My understanding of the concept of luck

I was always the unlucky person. Always missed the bus, left with a punctured tyre on my bicycle on an exam day, never could hit the right answers on any competitive exams and in love, never could spell out the right words at the right time...the list is endless. Even I had to and still have to fight for the slightest things that are available to the luckier herds so easily.

This made me think about the factor called luck time and again. From the perspective of mathematics, one could still explain it through the theory of probability but how about the biology of luck? Can we explain it?

Luck through the theory of probability
Its easy. The classic example of tossing a coin provided in all text books of probability says it all. If you toss a coin once you have a 50/50 chance of getting a head. You also run a 50/50 chance of having a tail. Now the lucky ones will always get a head and the unlucky ones will always have tail. However, if you toss the coin twice, you have a lucky situation of having head all 2 times and an unlucky situation of having tail twice. But it is the third situation where you end up getting head once and tail once which is more common occurrence. People get lucky in some situations and remain unlucky in others. We can increase the probability of this situation by increasing the number of attempts. For example, if you toss the coin 10 times, you probably could get lucky in 5 attempts and unlucky in the rest of them. Lucky nerds can still get lucky on all ten attempts, although a rare occurrence, still, you are in a competitive situation. Thus, we may infer that increasing the number of attempts increases our probability of getting lucky. And this is where the biological perspective becomes important.

Albert Einstein once remarked, "God doesn't play dice" and you were so wrong Mr Einstein. Yes God was always lucky. We never heard of any unlucky God in any culture. That is because of the reference frame. Its like tossing a coin with head on both sides. The plethora of life forms that surround us are the examples of God's playing dice. If we consider that evolution is in play as we continue to live our lives and it is happening right now as we speak, then the genetic recombination that gives rise to stronger, more adaptive species is continuous and expansive. The better genetic variants (luckier ones) has more survival advantage. Another example: luckier people are definitely having an edge over the unlucky ones in terms of natural selection and struggle for existence. The monkey who gets a lot of bananas all the time easily and luckily will be healthy and will give rise to a healthier offspring than the monkey who has to exhaust all his energy to fight and get a single banana and still remain hungry and irritated.

But it is a double edged sword. Although the examples I provided in the preceeding paragraph are theoretically sound and looks very advantageous for luckier people, from another perspective they may not be that advantageous. Being unlucky sometimes encourages us to explore more possibilities and to make another attempt. This endeavor actually makes us more strong finally whereas the luckier ones are more vulnerable. Genetically, the more recombination, mutation, addition etc, our genome has, the more flexible we are in terms of response to a particular environmental stimulus. That's why we are more adaptive to our environment than the Neanderthals.

So, what does it mean by the end of the day? It is good to be unlucky sometimes and take another shot instead of giving up. That makes us stronger and versatile and puts us in real advantage.

Women are from Mars and Men are from Venus

Are men and women really opposite? For a long time, thinkers have been describing males and females as opposite entities not only because they look different but also when it comes to behavior they respond to the same situation in entirely opposite ways. Women have been equated to everything gentle and men represented everything tough. Kind of beauty and the beast situation. No doubt that there are opposing differences between men and women in terms of how they think, their problem solving ability and expression of different emotions, what amuses me is the strange fact that they seem to love these differences and tend to get attracted to one another because of these differences. Hence, the notion, “opposites attract”. I believe it has been borrowed from the physical world where one sees opposite magnetic poles attracting each other and positively and negatively charged particles attracting each other. However, poets and literateurs have missed the fact that two different objects can also attract each other owing to the gravitational force working on them which is a function of their mass not their polarity. What I want to indicate here is that in order to attract, two objects not necessarily have to be opposite in properties. Thus men and women do not have to be opposite in order to attract each other. 

It is probably more rational to accept that they are just different. Although, I accept that “women are from Venus and men are from Mars” (contrary to the title of this article), biologically, men and women belong to the same species and they have a lot more in common than they are different. Genetically, they both have 22 pairs of somatic chromosomes called autosomes and one pair of “sex” (read gender) chromosome. In this sex chromosome pair, women have XX and men have XY. It is due to this Y chromosome that males are males and females are not. If you have read until this, keep reading.  

I will try to look at this aspect at a more higher resolution which will reveal that they are not that different at all. 

SRY, a master regulator gene of sex determination is situated on the Y chromosome and its expression during embryonic stages determines the gender of the individual. It regulates a bunch of genes those are mostly transcription factors and induces expression of a variety of hormones and signaling molecules leading to the development of male gonads. Most important among these hormones is testosterone which not only works on the gonads but also on several target tissues including brain. Probably, that could be one reason why men think differently, well if not in an opposite way. However, at this point, if you think that we have singled out the main difference, you are wrong. It is not a difference per se. You will be surprised to know that women also make testosterone. A closer look at the steroidogenic pathways would reveal that they are very similar except that women have Aromatase, an enzyme that uses up testosterone to make Estrogen, one of the major gender determining hormones present in the females. Ideally, this enzyme should not be expressed in males. So, what’s the big deal? Aren’t they different after all? Well, these steroidogenic pathways operate on a tight balance where every biochemical step is regulated by feedbacks and dynamic chemical equilibriums. It is very likely that this balance could be slightly tripped on one or the other side depending on some environmental cues. In fact, recent findings suggest that males do make Estrogens albeit at a very very low level compared to females and females don’t 

really exhaust all the testosterone to make estrogen. Actually, in addition to testosterone presence of traces of other androgens, metabolites that are intermediates to testosterone are also found in the females. Previously, it was thought that these hormones could not cross the blood-brain barrier. It is now well established that these steroid hormones have receptors in brain and definitely influence the way impulse is transmitted there. Traces of androgens are not just excess they are really required for normal health in a female. Not sure if the same thing is true with Estrogens in males. That’s why I believe that every woman has a man within her as every man has a woman in him. Honestly, don't you feel it that way?

             Additionally, environmental pollutants that mimic hormones can also trip the balance of this 'gender authenticity' and may produce phenotypes which could be intermediates between two extremes eg. ideal male and ideal female. So we will have a whole bunch of different mentalities (if not physicalities) ranging from female-ish male to male-ish female and we cannot tell one as the opposite of the other. This is definitely a gift of industrialization and that is what we are really finding around us in our time in the world we live in. This may also explain the gay and lesbian tendencies in human population and also in other animal species like primates.  

   

A cold gloomy morning

How about sleeping until the sun is up and staring at your face? You are hungry, your head blank and your eyes swollen...that was the way I got up from my bed for most mornings of my life. It didn't matter whether I was in India, Japan or USA. I followed the same internal rhythm while getting up in the morning. Because research says, the little after-sleep nap you indulge yourself on holidays..is actually good for your brain health. Your memory and learning new skills. I treasured this habbit of mine as intellectual and tried to find similar attributes in artists, musicians and poets who were successful. I was happy the way I was.

Now, I get up before dawn, check my mails, have my coffee wake up my 3yr old daughter who has to go to school at 8 before going for shower. Sometimes I have to manage a little bit of exercise during that time and finally get dressed for going out to drive my daughter to school before going to work. During winter months this is the time when the sky starts brightening up. There is no sun in Pittsburgh for most winter days and it is a cloudy, gloomy morning many times with snow covered roads. I drive listening to Glenn Beck on my car FM. I can't believe what a strange turnaround and departure from my long nurtured so called "intellectual" habbits.

My wife says, everybody has a finite quota of sleep for his entire life and I have already slept mine. So its