Garden of the Mind

New mothers must be collectors of broken sleep, eagerly taking a sliver here, a shard there – whatever they can get.

Now that my baby is four months old, she’s finally sleeping at night. Still, she wakes me every two hours to nurse. She is half asleep while she feeds and I am always nodding off. In the few seconds it takes for my sinking head or my nursing baby to summon me back, I’ll have a momentary dream. A micro-dream. A nano-nap. No more intricate dreams of forgetting to do my homework or going to prom in a maternity dress. These dreams are all business: snapshots of everyday life. Once it may be a view of my husband lifting the baby out of her crib. Another time, I glimpse a lump in bed beside me and realize it’s my baby buried in our blankets (a terrifying dream.) But usually I simply dream that she’s nursing. A dream of mere reality: no more, no less.

How do I even know that I’m dreaming? The details are off. And in these cases, the switch from dreaming to wakefulness can be particularly strange. Once the transition felt as seamless as a change of camera shots in a television show. One moment I was looking down at my nursing baby; the next, she was flipped (mirror-reversed) in my arms and her head was noticeably smaller! Never before have I had such an immediate comparison between the mind’s eye and the naked eye, nor realized how very similar they feel. And never before have I had such uninventive, literal dreams. It’s as if I can’t muster the energy to dream up anything better.

In the face of my lackluster dreaming, I am all the more fascinated by the rich dream life of my daughter. From the day she was born I’ve watched her smile, pout, and wince and heard her scream and giggle madly in her sleep. In fact, she smiled in her sleep months before she gave us her first waking smile. Physicians have observed rapid eye movements in fetuses, suggesting that babies dream in the womb. But what are they dreaming of? Is it limited to what they know: heartbeats and jostling and amniotic fluid? Or perhaps their dreams are wilder than our own, unconstrained by the realities of life on this earth. After all, the infant brain contains legions of unpruned synapses and far more neurons than that of an adult. Who’s to say what sort of fantasy it might come up with?

Whatever sort of dreams a newborn has, we don’t remember them as adults. By late infancy, we’ve already pruned enough synapses and experienced enough of the world to have a basic vocabulary for our dreams. An adult’s dream may create some odd combinations – eyeballs growing on trees or hats that unfurl into snakes – but the vocabulary, the unitary elements, are fixed. Eyeballs, trees, hats, snakes. Grow, unfurl. Our potential dreamscapes are wholly constrained by the details of our waking existence.

As my baby examines new places and things, I am reminded that she’s cobbling together her own vocabulary of the world. She will store away sensations, objects, creatures, actions, concepts, cultures, and myths. A knowledge that the sun shines from above and plants sprout from below. That rivers run and lakes loiter. That caterpillars turn into butterflies and never the other way around. For better or for worse, her future dreams will be shaped by the idiosyncrasies of our funny little world.

I recently bought my baby new pajamas with a decal that says, “50% Dad + 50% Mom = 100% Me!” I couldn’t resist an outfit that doubles as both math and biology lessons. But on further reflection, I’ve realized that this simple formula is wrong in more ways than one.

To begin with, my baby doesn’t look like she’s 50% Mom. At best, she looks about 10% Mom. I’ve written before about how our daughter would be a mixture of traits from European and Indian peoples, reflecting her mom and dad’s respective heritages. Yet she arrived looking like a wholly Indian baby. This is fine, of course. I think she’s absolutely perfect with her caramel skin and jet black eyes and hair. But it’s hard to keep a straight face when friends politely ask us who we think she resembles. And when I’m out with her in public I’m aware that I look like her nanny, if not someone who’s stolen a baby. She truly doesn’t look like she’s mine.

How else is the formula wrong? Genetically. Sure, our daughter’s nuclear genes are comprised of DNA sequences from both my husband and me. But she has another sort of DNA in her body, one that literally outweighs the conventional type. This DNA lives in her mitochondria, the bacteria-like structures that populate our every cell. Mitochondria are like tiny internal combustion engines, generating all of our energy through respiration and releasing heat that makes us warm-blooded animals. Although mitochondria don’t have many actual genes, they each carry several copies of those genes. Multiply that by the 10 million billion or so mitochondria in our bodies and you’ll find that we each contain more DNA by weight for mitochondria than humans. And these mitochondrial genes are inherited entirely from the mother.

Mitochondrial genes can’t claim credit for your eye color, jaw shape, or intrinsic disposition. Their reach is mostly limited to details of your metabolism and your susceptibility to certain diseases. But mitochondrial DNA is significant for another reason: scientists use it to trace human lineages across the globe. After all, they don’t get reshuffled in each generation as our nuclear genes are. Mitochondrial inheritance can be traced back hundreds of thousands of years, following the maternal lineage at every generation. Unlike the historian’s genealogy, which often follows surnames passed down from fathers, the scientist’s genealogy is a tree built of mothers alone.

So it is through our mothers that our heritages can be traced into the distant past. In every one of her cells, my baby carries a map leading back through me and my mother and her mother and beyond . . . unbroken all the way back to our earliest origins as modern humans. And since my baby is a girl, she can continue that line. So long as she has a daughter and she has a daughter and so on, I will remain a part of that ongoing chain.

My condolences to all you men out there. Same to all you women who only had sons. You’ve passed on your nuclear genes and your child may be the spitting image of you, but your mitochondrial chain has been broken and you will be left out of the biologist’s tree. Although my daughter looks classically Indian, her mitochondrial DNA reveal only her European lineage. Despite the hair, eyes, and skin she inherited from her daddy, my baby’s mitochondria are mine all mine. She and I are links in a traceable chain of human life while my husband is nowhere to be found.

That’s something I can remember the next time I’m mistaken for the nanny.

I’m a mommy now. My daughter arrived, healthy and beautiful, almost three months ago. Since then I’ve been working hard to feed her, nurture her, and just generally figure her out. I’ve studied her and our relationship with a scientist’s eye and two observations struck me as particularly odd. One of them relates to her, the other to myself.

My daughter is a strange, adorable little creature. I’m sure all babies are. As a newborn, she seemed to live in a hazy, alternate world. Her vision was poor and she seemed oblivious to the happenings around her. Motion, people, colors, noises – none of them drew her attention. She only cared about the girls. The twins. The Boobies.

I tried to imagine how she experienced hunger in those early days. It must have been a new sensation, as her needs in utero were continuously met via the umbilical cord. And this new sensation must have felt awful. Without a label for hunger and an understanding of its cause, it would probably feel distressingly similar to pain. I personally can’t tolerate the feeling of hunger, even after decades of experience with it. I snack constantly to stave off any trace of the sensation. My daughter doesn’t have the ability to eat at will or express her hunger in clear, unequivocal terms. No wonder her waking moments have been centered on meeting this one existential need.

Still, my newborn daughter didn’t simply need to eat. Nursing was her first love affair. Her first smiles were bestowed not on me, but on my breasts. And after her hunger was sated, she’d cuddle and hug them. She’d hold the nipple in her smiling mouth or run her lips repeatedly across it (a move I called ‘making out with booby’).  She inevitably fell asleep embracing my breast, calm and happy as any creature can be. Before she knew a thing about people or relationships my daughter was already deeply in love.

Just as I was noticing my baby’s budding romance, I discovered an odd sensation in myself. When I looked at her and felt intense love, I had the strange urge to eat her. Not literally, of course. I just found myself feeling that holding her wasn’t enough; I wanted her to be even closer to me. I wanted to, as they say, gobble her up. People say things to that effect about babies all of the time: “I could just gobble him up,” or, “she’s cute enough to eat.” My husband’s relatives tell me that a similar saying exists in India. There, people talk of swallowing an adorable baby.

I have even experienced a milder version of this urge with my husband. When I feel it, I give him a kiss. It’s the same with my daughter. I press my face to her cheek, inhale her scent and cover her with kisses. I can’t help it; I am constantly kissing my baby. And while kissing is far from eating, they certainly resemble each other. This odd connection brought to mind the nicknames we typically use for our loved ones, names like sweetie, honey, and cutie pie. Many are suspiciously gustatory, as if we’ve been nibbling away at our spouses and children for years. And if you consider our lifetime of kisses, we virtually have been.

But why do we make this connection? Eating one’s spouse and children is certainly the strangest and most macabre scenario I can imagine. Why is some glimmer of that urge hidden within us? I look at my baby and wonder if the answer is right in front of me. People say that you never forget your first love. Maybe that’s true. Maybe our early love affair with food lays down primal associations between infatuation and ingestion. Maybe that’s why I shower my baby with kisses. Maybe that’s why I study her sweet face while she’s sleeping. I’m trying to drink it all in.

Today, at a full 9 months pregnant, I waddled around our neighborhood running errands in my frumpy maternity clothes. I passed men in designer shades and shoes, women in dresses with cinched belts and high heeled boots, cars with six-figure stickers. And just like every other outing I’ve made over the last few months, I got more stares than the slick cars and chic women.

My husband and I live next to a huge college campus and some pretty swanky LA neighborhoods. Here, young, beautiful people and expensive toys abound. In this particular area, it’s the pregnant lady who sticks out (particularly one traveling on foot). Sometimes I feel like an exotic, awkward species let loose from the zoo. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. Strangers strike up friendly conversations with me now when I’m out and about. They ask me: boy or girl? Or, when’s your due date? People have offered me their seats in waiting areas and a bus once made an extra stop for me when I would otherwise have missed it. I’ve had cashiers, bus drivers, and a homeless man bless my child. I’ve also had strangers touch my stomach, which is a little odd but usually also kind of endearing.

What I find most interesting about walking around these days is how people look at me. In particular, I notice the reactions of college girls that crowd our neighborhood sidewalks. These girls are all young, mostly quite thin and lovely and often fashionably dressed. They tend to roam around in packs, their heels clattering on the concrete. They laugh too loud and flash their still-white teeth and know that they’ve got years to go before getting pregnant and having kids, if in fact they ever do.

Many of these girls ignore me or do a double take and then look away. Nothing special. But sometimes one of them will gaze at my oddly shaped body with a look of open revulsion. Others will catch my eye and flash me a dreamy smile, as if we are sharing a secret or a promise of some sort. Why do the most striking reactions always come from college women? It’s possible that they haven’t yet learned the art of masking their emotions in public, but I don’t think that’s it. I’ve realized that they aren’t reacting to me, but rather to what I represent. For these young women, I illustrate a future that either frightens or delights them. Months of being comically tubby and uncomfortable. Going through the pain and excitement of labor. Experiencing the joys and responsibilities of motherhood. These girls see all of that in me.

It’s a strange and fascinating intimacy that I have never experienced before. I am more than a pregnant woman waddling down the block. For these girls, I am a reminder. A warning. A mirror. And for a single moment on the street, their expressions reveal everything. I am privy to something personal and private about these strangers’ hopes and fears, about how they see their futures and themselves.

This week I’m sharing some personal news (a.k.a. a shameless plug). A short story of mine was just published. It’s my first fiction publication and therefore something of a milestone for me. The piece is called “Peep” and it appeared in the fall issue of The Coachella Review, a literary magazine. You can read the story here.

I’ve confused some of my friends with my eclectic writing interests. My publications to date (scientific papers and now a short story) reflect my writing goals for the future: to write both literary fiction and scientific nonfiction for a general audience. Recently, I’ve been at work revising a novel draft and researching a major neuroscience project meant to share some of the most fascinating facets of the field with nonscientists.

If you wind up reading “Peep” and have any comments, please feel free to post them here. I’d love to hear your thoughts. And my apologies in advance if the story gives you the willies!

My belly button has all but disappeared. In its place, an odd little pillow of skin lies flush with the rest of my stomach. A dark line – the linea nigra – now runs down the length of my abdomen, dividing me in two. My appendix and intestines, previously at home in my abdominal cavity, have been pushed up and to the sides so that they now form mysterious bulges just below my ribs. Stranger still, I find myself in possession of someone else’s breasts. And then there’s the most noticeable change: the beach ball sized stomach that wholly eclipses my view of my feet.

Of course these changes didn’t come on all at once. I’ve had many months to notice and adjust to them. Still, they’ve happened more rapidly than any other physical changes I’ve experienced in my life. Faster than an adolescent growth spurt, certainly, or any weight gain or loss. My brain has had trouble keeping up. I bump into things with my belly, forgetting its size. I struggle to maintain my balance as my vestibular system tries to adjust to my changing weight distribution. But the lag that has fascinated me most is how I envision myself in my dreams.

Even months into my pregnancy, after my stomach had visibly ballooned, the self I inhabited while dreaming remained as lean as ever. Although thoughts of my pregnancy filled my waking hours, at night I wasn’t the least bit pregnant. In fact, I often dreamt of myself as a high schooler again, wandering the halls without a class schedule or scrambling to find a bus that would deliver me there on time. Why high school? I don’t put much stock in the elaborate interpretation of dream symbols, but I imagine that my dreams of being a lost high school student reflect my waking awareness that parenthood is at my doorstep and I am unprepared. In the face of such a dramatic life change, I can’t help but feel that I’ve lost my lunchbox or forgotten a homework assignment somewhere.

Then, a month or so ago, my dreams began to change. Or rather my dream self changed. My new self often had a swollen midsection and wore maternity clothes (or in one case, a maternity prom dress). She couldn’t drink alcohol and got worn out just walking from the car. The dreams weren’t usually about my pregnancy; my enormous belly was simply present, just like my arm, hands, and feet. Something about my self-image, my internal body schema, had updated. A switch had been flipped and my mind was caught up with my changing body.

I began to wonder about these internal self-schemas that reveal themselves in our dreams. Do other pregnant women experience the same switch and a similar lag? And how long does it take for them to switch back after they’ve delivered their babies? What about other changes to one’s appearance, like growing or shaving off a beard? Or, in a more dramatic example, what happens when someone loses a limb?

I haven’t found much written on baby bumps and beards, but several people have studied whether amputees dream of themselves with intact or amputated bodies. The answer, in short, is it depends. One study found that a majority of surveyed amputees dreamt of themselves with amputated bodies at least some of the time. Among them, 77% made the switch within the first 6 months following their amputations. But the study also showed that a surprising percentage of the surveyed amputees (31%) dreamt exclusively of themselves with intact bodies, even a decade or more after their amputations. Preliminary findings suggest that those who undergo the amputation at a later age, those who regularly use a prosthetic limb, and those who experience phantom sensations from the missing limb may all be more likely to dream with their bodies intact.

It should come as no surprise that the results of the studies are complicated and variable. We can’t expect anything as complex as dreams and internal self-representations to be wholly consistent from person to person or from one dream to another. In my case, I may be pregnant in one dream but not in the next. At times I even dream I’m someone other than myself. Wading into dreams can be a messy business, certainly, but my curiosity is piqued and I’m eager for more data. To all those pregnant or post-pregnant ladies, beard growers, or head shavers out there: please comment and share your experiences! How long did it take for your dream self to catch up with the real thing?

These days, I find myself turning off the news while thinking the same question. When did we stop valuing knowledge and expertise? When did impressive academic credentials become a political liability? When did the medical advice of celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Ricki Lake become more trusted than those of government safety panels, scientists, and physicians? When did running a small business or being a soccer mom qualify a person to hold the office of president and make economic and foreign policy decisions?

As Rick Perry, the Republican front-runner for president recently told us, “You don’t have to have a PhD in economics from Harvard to really understand how to get America back working again.” Really? Why not? It certainly seems to me that some formal training would help. And yet many in Congress pooh-poohed economists’ warnings about the importance of raising the debt ceiling and have insisted on decreasing regulations despite the evidence that this won’t help to improve our economy (and will further harm our environment.) Meanwhile, man-made climate change is already affecting our planet. Natural disasters such as droughts and hurricanes are on the rise, just as scientists predicted. But we were slow to accept their warnings and have been slow to enact any meaningful policies to stem the course of this calamity.

The devaluation of expertise is puzzling enough, but perhaps more puzzling still is the timing. Never before in human history have we witnessed the fruits of expertise as we do today. Thanks to scientists and engineers, we rely on cell phones that wirelessly connect us to the very person we want to talk to at the moment we want to talk. In turn, these cell phones operate through satellites that nameless experts have set spinning in precise orbits around Earth. We keep in touch with friends, do our banking and bill-paying, and make major purchases using software written in codes we don’t understand and transmitted over a network whose very essence we struggle to comprehend. (I mean, what exactly is the Internet?) Meanwhile, physicians use lasers to excise tumors and correct poor vision. They replace damaged livers and hearts. They fit amputees with hi-tech artificial limbs, some with feet that flex and hands that grasp.

Obviously none of this would have been possible without experts. You need more than high school math and a casual grasp of physics or anatomy to develop these complex systems, tools, and techniques. So why on Earth would we discount experts now, when we have more proof than ever of their worth?

My only guess is education. Our national public education system is in shambles. American children rank 25^th globally in math and 21^st in science. At least two-thirds of American students cannot read at grade level. But there is something our student score high on. As the documentary Waiting for Superman highlighted, American students rank number one in confidence. This may stem from the can-do culture of the United States or from the success our nation has enjoyed over the last 65 years. But it makes for a dangerous combination. We are churning out students with inadequate knowledge and skills, but who believe they can intuit and accomplish anything. And if you believe that, then why not believe you know better than the experts?

I think the only remedy for this situation is better education, but not for the reasons you might think. In my opinion, the more a person learns about any given academic subject, the more realistic and targeted his or her self-confidence becomes.

The analogy that comes to mind is of a blind man trying to climb a tree. When he’s still at the base of the tree, all he can feel is the trunk. From there, he has little sense of the size or shape of the rest of the tree.  But suppose he climbs up on a limb and then out to even smaller branches. He still won’t know the shape of the rest of the tree, but from his perch on one branch, he can feel the extensive foliage. He’ll know that the tree must be large and he can presume that the other branches are equally long and intricate. He can appreciate how very much there must be of the tree that’s beyond his reach.

I think the same principle applies to knowledge. The more we know, the more we can appreciate how much else there is out there to know – things about which we haven’t got a clue. As we climb out on our tiny branches, acquiring knowledge, we also gain an awareness of our profound ignorance. Unfortunately, many of America’s children (and by now, adults too) aren’t climbing the tree at all; they’re still lounging at the base, enjoying a picnic in the shade.

Should it surprise us, then, to learn that they don’t see the value in expertise? That they can support political candidates who disparage the advice of specialists and depict academic achievement as a form of elitism? Why shouldn’t they trust the advice of a neighbor, a talk show host, or an actor over the warnings of the ‘educated elite’?

No single person can know everything there is to know in today’s world, so the sum of human knowledge must be dispersed among millions of specialized experts. Human progress relies on these people, dangling from their obscure little branches, to help guide our technology, our public policy, our research and governance. Our world has no shortage of experts. Now if only people would start listening to them.

There’s that term again. Mindfulness. It seems to pop up everywhere these days, like the phrase “Don’t have a cow” did in the early 90’s. Like the concept of free love in the 60’s, or isolationism of the 30’s, mindfulness is all the rage in this new millennium.

I’ve come across the concept through family and friends, readings, and now relaxation techniques for labor. Advocates say you can use it to relieve stress, improve physical health, and manage depression and anxiety disorders.

Focus on your breath, they tell you. Become aware of the sensations in your body. Clear your mind of other thoughts and just be in the present moment.

This is, of course, far easier said than done. Now more than ever, with cell phones going off and email, Facebook, and television all clamoring for our attention, we are accustomed to constant entertainment. Even in the few spare moments while we wait for a friend or stand in line at the store, our smart phones feed us a steady stream of news updates, comedic videos, and celebrity gossip. With such entertainment at our very fingertips, it seems impossible to simply focus on our breaths. We would just get so bored.

The problem is that, while distracting ourselves might ward off boredom, it doesn’t seem to make us very happy. Consider a research article published in Science last year with the catchy title ‘A Wandering Mind in an Unhappy Mind.’ The authors used an app that contacted subjects on their iPhones at random times during the day and asked them to record what they were doing at that very moment and rate how they were feeling, from very bad to very good. Finally, it asked them whether they were thinking about something other than what they were currently doing (i.e., not being mindful) and if so, whether that thought was pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant.

What did the authors find? About half of the time, subjects reported that they were thinking about something other than their current activity. The study showed that subjects were less happy when their minds wandered to neutral or negative thoughts than when they were being mindful about the present moment. Even when their minds wandered to positive thoughts, they were no happier than when their thoughts were engaged in the current activity. In short, being ‘mindless’ doesn’t make you feel better, and it can potentially make you feel a whole lot worse.

Another example comes from the remarkable personal experience of a neuroscientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, who suffered a massive hemorrhagic stroke that damaged much of her left hemisphere. In her memoir, My Stoke of Insight, she describes the extraordinary changes she underwent as the stroke ravaged her left hemisphere. She lost the capacity to produce or understand speech and could not walk. But perhaps the most striking detail in her description was the mindfulness she experienced as a result of her brain trauma.

As she writes, “I stopped thinking in language and shifted to taking new pictures of what was going on in the present moment. I was not capable of deliberating about past or future-related ideas because those cells were incapacitated. All I could perceive was right here, right now, and it was beautiful.”

Her experience of perfect mindfulness in the present moment brought her a profound sense of peace and oneness with the rest of the universe. Many who regularly use mindfulness techniques say they experience those same feelings as a benefit of their practice.

Over the course of several years, Dr. Bolte Taylor underwent a miraculous neurological recovery that returned her brain functions. But with all of those gains, she lost something as well. As she puts it, “Now that my left mind’s language centers and storyteller are back to functioning normally, I find my mind not only spins a wild tale but has a tendency to hook into negative patterns of thought.” She now uses mindfulness techniques like focusing on the sensations in her body to bring herself back when her mind is wandering to negativity.

By now, I’m sold on the benefits of mindfulness meditation. I’ve listened to meditation tapes, taken mindfulness classes, and even done a daylong retreat. Yet I still can’t coax myself to sit down and practice it regularly. There are just so many other things to do, and even household chores sound more fun (or at least less boring) than just breathing for a half an hour.

Now, more than six months into my pregnancy, my thoughts are turning to my impending labor. I’ve looked for tools to handle the pain and fear that may come with it. Today, Lamaze is out and meditation is in. From medical doctors to so-called hypnobirthing classes, everyone is recommending mindfulness meditation techniques for relaxation during labor. So I’ll give just being another try because this time it seems that the New Agers are actually on to something.

My husband spotted another one yesterday. A half-Indian, half-Caucasian blend. The woman had an Indian first and last name, but her features were more typical of a Persian ethnicity than either Indian or white. My husband overheard her describing her heritage and smiled. These days, with a half-Indian, half-white baby on the way, we’re hungry for examples of what our baby might look like. We’ve found a few examples among our acquaintances and some of my husband’s adorable nieces and nephews, not to mention the occasional Indian-Caucasian celebrity like Norah Jones. We think our baby will be beautiful and perfect, of course, although we’re doubtful that she’ll look very much like either one of us.

Many couples and parents-to-be are in the same position we are. In the United States, at least 1 in 7 marriages takes place between people of different races or ethnicities, and that proportion only seems to be increasing. It’s a remarkable statistic, particularly when you consider that interracial marriage was illegal in several states less than 50 years ago. (See the story of Loving Day for details on how these laws were finally overturned.) In keeping with the marriage rates, the number of American mixed race children is skyrocketing as well. It’s common to be, as a friend puts it, a “halfsie.” At least in urban areas like Los Angeles, being mixed race has lost the negative stigma it had decades ago and many young people celebrate their mixed heritages. Their unique combinations of facial and physical features can be worn with pride. But the mixture goes deeper than just the skin and eyes and hair.

At the level of DNA, all modern humans are shockingly similar to one another (and for that matter, to chimpanzees). However, over the hundreds of thousands of years of migrations to different climates and environments, we’ve accumulated a decent number of variant genes. Some of these differences emerged and hung around for no obvious reason, but others stuck because they were adaptive for the new climates and circumstances that different peoples found themselves in. Genes that regulate melanin production and determine skin color are a great example of this; peoples who stayed in Africa or settled in other locations closer to the Equator needed more protection from the sun while those who settled in sites closer to the poles may have benefited from lighter skin to absorb more of the sun’s scarce winter rays and stave off vitamin D deficiency.

In a very real way, the genetic variations endemic to different ethnic groups carry the history of their people and the environments and struggles that they faced. For instance, my husband’s Indian heritage puts him at risk for carrying a gene mutation that causes alpha thalassemia. If a person inherits two copies of this mutation (one from each parent), he or she will either die soon after birth or develop anemia. But inheriting one copy of the gene variant confers a handy benefit – it makes the individual less likely to catch malaria. (The same principle applies for beta thalassemia and sickle cell anemia found in other ethnic populations.) Meanwhile, my European heritage puts me at risk for carrying a genetic mutation linked to cystic fibrosis. Someone who inherits two copies of this gene will develop the debilitating respiratory symptoms of cystic fibrosis, but thanks to a handy molecular trick, those with only one copy may be less susceptible to dying from cholera or typhoid fever. As the theory goes, these potentially lethal mutations persist in their respective populations because they confer a targeted survival advantage.

Compared to babies born to two Indian or two Caucasian parents, our baby has a much lower risk of inheriting alpha thalassemia or cystic fibrosis, respectively, since these diseases require two copies of the mutation. But our child could potentially inherit one copy of each of these mutations, endowing her with some Suberbaby immunity benefits but also putting her children at risk for either disease (depending on the ethnicity of her spouse).

The rise in mixed race children will require changes down the road for genetic screening protocols. It will also challenge preconceived notions about appearance, ethnicity, and disease. But beyond these practical issues, there is something wonderful about this mixing of genetic variants and the many thousands of years of divergent world histories they represent. With the growth in air travel, communication, and the Internet, it’s become a common saying that the world is getting smaller. But Facebook and YouTube are only the beginning. Thanks to interracial marriage, we’ve shrunk the world to the size of a family. And now, in the form of our children’s DNA, it has been squeezed inside the nucleus of the tiny human cell.

The results are in. The ultrasound was conclusive. And despite my previously described hunch that our growing baby is a boy, she turned out to be a girl. We are, of course, ecstatic. A healthy baby and a girl to boot! As everyone tells us, girls are simply more fun.

As I was reading in my pregnancy book the other day, I came across an interesting bit of trivia about baby girls. At this point in my pregnancy (nearly 6 months in), our baby’s ovaries contain all the eggs she’ll have for her entire life. As I mentioned in a prior post, the fact that a female fetus develops her lifetime supply of eggs in utero represents a remarkable transgenerational link. In essence, half of the genetic material that makes up my growing baby already existed inside my mother when she was pregnant. And now, inside me, exists half of the genetic material that will become all of the grandchildren I will ever have. This is the kind of link that seems to mix science and spirituality, that reminds us that, though we are a mere cluster of cells, there’s a poetry to the language of biology and Life.

But after stumbling upon this factoid about our baby’s eggs, I was also struck by a sense that somewhere someone seemed to have his or her priorities mixed up. If our baby were born today, she would have a slim chance of surviving. Her intestines, cerebral blood vessels, and retinas are immature and not ready for life outside the womb. Worse still, the only shot her lungs would have at functioning is with the aid of extreme medical intervention. The order of it all seems crazy. My baby is equipped with everything she’ll need to reproduce decades in the future, yet she lacks the lung development to make it five minutes in the outside world. What was biology thinking?

Then I remembered two delightful popular science books I’d read recently, The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and Life Ascending by Nick Lane. Both described the Red Queen Hypothesis of the evolution of sex, which states that the reason so much of the animal kingdom reproduces sexually (rather than just making clones of itself) is to ‘outwit’ parasites. In short, if each generation of humans were the same as the next, parasites large and microbial could evolve to overtake us. By mixing up our genetic makeup through sexual reproduction, we make it harder for illnesses to wipe us out. Like the Red Queen from Lewis Carroll’s classic, we keep running in order to stay in the same place (which is one step ahead of parasites and disease).

Just as there are parasitic organisms and bacteria, one might say that there are parasitic genes. For example, mutations in the DNA of our own replicating cells can cause cancer, which is essentially a self-made, genetic parasite. Moreover, retroviruses like HIV are essentially bits of genetic material that invade our bodies and can insert themselves into the DNA of our cells. And the ultimate road to immortality for a parasitic gene would be to hitch a ride on the back of reproduction. Imagine what an easy life that would be! If a retrovirus could invade the eggs in the ovaries, it would be passed on from one generation to the next without doing one iota of work. It’s the holy grail of parasitic invasion – get thee to the ovaries! According to Matt Ridley in another of his books, The Origins of Virtue, the human germ line is segregated from the rest of the growing embryo by 56 days after fertilization. Within two months of conception, the cells that will give rise to all of the embryo’s eggs (or sperm, in males) are already cordoned off. They are kept safe until they are needed many years in the future.

So perhaps my little baby’s development isn’t as backwards as it seemed at first. Yes, lungs are important. But when you’ve got something of value to others, it makes practical sense to hurry up and lock it away.