There's a lot to be said here about how the homunculus theory of human reproduction - the medieval belief that sperm actually contained tiny little miniature humans that just needed to be planted in a womb and grow - never really any away That's still the popular idea of DNA
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Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
People really think that if you could flawlessly "read your DNA" it would be like a little photograph of you That the things we actually observe about human beings - what you look like, your personality, your IQ - are "written into your genes" in some objective way
2 replies 11 retweets 74 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
And it's at best an oversimplification and at worst an active and damaging lie The whole thing where pop culture "clones" are exact xerox duplicates When in real life identical twins often don't even really look the same
1 reply 8 retweets 69 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
Like, it's not uncommon to meet twins where one of them is taller than the other, or heavier, or has different hair or skin, especially as they get older (and are no longer living in the same house with the same environment)
4 replies 3 retweets 63 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
And, like, both twins "really" look like that, they're both the way they "really" should be, there's not some Ideal Human "encoded into their genes" that's the way they "should" look under "ideal conditions" That's not a real concept, that's Nazi shit
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Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
What the absolute fuck are you talking about?
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Replying to @Shatterface @sophienotemily and
There is no single real person "encoded" by a set of DNA There are an infinite possible number of people (and non-people, like tumors) that DNA could "encode"
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Shatterface and
Part of the problem is the necessity of teaching by analogy, and the fact that we very frequently choose bad analogies to teach. I suspect that in grade school every time DNA was mentioned in one of my classes it was called a blueprint where recipe would be inaccurate but better
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Replying to @roninkakuhito @Shatterface and
If more people knew coding it would provide a much better analogy DNA "code" is only code, it isn't assets
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Replying to @arthur_affect @roninkakuhito and
The "assets" that make a human being - the cellular machinery that "compiles" DNA and the organic environment it exists in, the actual stuff that DNA just arranges in a certain order - contains orders of magnitude more information than the code
3 replies 1 retweet 7 likes
It isn't even a recipe, it's like an order It's like when you yell into the kitchen "Two number 10s and a 4 only swap the side from a 3" In a different kitchen where those numbers correspond to different menu items you'd get a completely different meal
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Shatterface and
And the kitchen's prep line is not static so the results of those orders in the same kitchen can vary widely
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