Draw brakes on Taino tattle, Mr Thwaites

Having read the excellent and thought-provoking articles of Daniel Thwaites over the past year or so, I have begun to follow his column. It is, therefore, with some sadness that I have come to view his commentary on Prof. Erica Neeganadwedgin's claim to be Taino.

Mr Thwaites cites her "emotionally laden follow-up article 'I am not extinct - Pt II', but then flew off at a tangent to it and right into referring her to Ward 21. Now, I simply cannot see that the DSM Physician's Manual would justify the Thwaites diagnosis and prescriptive. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) sets out a list of codes which identify each individual diagnosis used by psychiatrists and all are quite meticulously worded.

I believe that the good lawyer ought not to bandy words on the subject of mental incompetence in a publication that is as widely read and, in some quarters of Jamaica, seen as virtual gospel, and in particular, in relation to a woman who ought to know better than to make specious or patently questionable statements to the public, which should amount to mischievousness.

In advising this, I would invite Daniel Thwaites and fellow followers of his very witty and captivating column to take the way we cognise this matter to another level, and to begin by considering that many dark-skinned, as well as even lighter-pale, Jamaicans lay claim to being Africans, despite the fact that they bear little resemblance to the original transported people (mainland African expression), or slaves of the diaspora. How can this be?

If Daniel Thwaites dismisses Erica's claims to an affinity of her feelings, or 'blood memories', he must likewise dismiss the claims of these wannabe Africans as equally spurious, especially that of those most distanced in lineage from the original African diaspora stock.

Now, venturing into the statistical analytical approach of Mr Thwaites in evaluating the professor's claim to being Taino, and basing it on a single progenitor going back 15 generations ago with the assumption of three generations per century for 500 years, we arrive at one in three or (1/3) raised to the power of 15. This works out at approximately .0000006, which is a few digits less than Thwaites' approximation. A very slender thread of continuity in the bloodline, indeed.

However, assuming that Thwaites is correct about Erica's remoteness, which he assesses at 500 years distant from a single Taino forebear, this must mean that there is something else to the Taino genomic inheritance that she carries than meets the eye for her to feel the way she does about her selfhood, and hence default identification with the Taino strain of our humanity.

By the same token, something similar must be operating for those Jamaicans showing the least kinship resemblance to Africans asserting the selfhood that they hold dear. What we need to consider here is what I should summarise as an 'epi-phenomenon'. It is now known that there are factors outside of the genome that can condition the individual to the pattern of selfhood, which comes to operate as the default personality, or aspect of the personality in which the human individual feels more cosy to reside.

This epiphenomenon may also account for why Jamaicans run much more successfully than the rest of the field of competitors at the big international meetings. In one of the major domains (genetics and molecular cell biology) of the science that I studied for my first degree some four decades ago, there was susurration among scientists about the 'something' because some traits or characteristics could not be accounted for by DNA inheritance patterns alone.

Nowadays, the term 'epigenetics' has emerged among biologists to account for this odd 'something'. Some ancient Terran human cultures saw the 'something' as being in the blood. Hence, I must agree with Daniel's use of the epithet, 'blood memories'. Perhaps Thwaites might be best advised to accept the explanation of the Taino elder, and to not scoff at the distraught lady's assertions of a 'Native' selfhood.

We ought to come to a much better meeting ground where we will be good listeners to one another, and be less swift to scoff at, or to be dismissive of the claims to selfhood made by some of our brethren.

Dr LLoyd S. Gordon is a collaborator with the Medical Faculty of the UWI in basic medicine and an expert in genetics/molecular biology in botany. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and qoinstresearch@gmail.com.