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
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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
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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)
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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
I find it interesting to note who is talking about 'ideal' humans and what appearance people 'should' have. The relevant term is 'would' have... Moreover, I don't recall saying TW 'shouldn't' transition, merely that underlying biology remains unchanged.
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Replying to @unwitod @sophienotemily and
"Would" have when? There are millions of different things you can make using one set of DNA, many of them not meaningfully human (look at the HeLa cells and other tumorous growths)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @unwitod and
Come on, you know how the word "would" works I look different than the person my DNA "would" have encoded? "Would" under what circumstances? "Natural" circumstances? "Normal" circumstances? "Ideal" circumstances? You can't say it without invoking a value judgment
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Replying to @arthur_affect @unwitod and
It helps me to see DNA as "source code" with a huge number of lines commented out. It matters which lines are commented out, and once we figure out how to read the comments, we can alter them directly without touching the sequence. Expression is not a single reading of source.
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Replying to @TrakoZG
That's better but it's still extremely reductive for what we're talking about here. If DNA is the "source code" for much of the core engine then RNA, proteins, and even organelles, cells, and organs are like higher-level scripting languages where a lot of the real work happens.
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Yeah I said earlier that if we must use the coding analogy the important thing is DNA does not contain any *assets* An alien robot that got a person's genome with no knowledge - or even less than totally complete knowledge - of our biological environment couldn't clone you
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They couldn't do anything with it, it would be meaningless Like giving someone who's never heard of football a list of stats from a game - possession of the ball, yards gained/lost, etc - and asking them to reenact it
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Damn that is such a good explanation
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