I know hair color and texture can change when people get treated for cancer. Speaking of which, cancer is 100% natural! Natural is not Good
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Replying to @sophienotemily @arthur_affect and
But I think this obsession with DNA is 100% philosophical - the idea that there's a blueprint somewhere for what you "should" be and that deviating from it is bad
4 replies 1 retweet 65 likes -
Replying to @sophienotemily @arthur_affect and
It's Plato's Ideal You, but with a veneer of science (that most of us aren't educated enough in to understand; I include myself in this, I only know the basics of how DNA works)
3 replies 1 retweet 55 likes -
Replying to @sophienotemily @vashti and
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
4 replies 5 retweets 66 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
No, Arthur, it really isn't. Is a blueprint for an aircraft a tiny aircraft?
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Replying to @GCPaulM @sophienotemily and
DNA is not a "blueprint" for anything
1 reply 2 retweets 14 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
The use of *any* metaphor like "blueprint" or "recipe" or "code" is wrong because it implies an anthropomorphic designer, someone who "wrote" the code while having a living human being in mind, which never happened But if you must use a metaphor DNA is like code with no assets
2 replies 3 retweets 15 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
It's a sequence of a bunch of switches to flip Most of the information that makes a functional human being is in the switches being flipped (the cellular machinery and organic environment of the human body)
2 replies 2 retweets 10 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
Of course, but I was using the term in a colloquial way to draw the distinction between the homunculus idea and DNA.
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Replying to @GCPaulM @sophienotemily and
No, it's the same thing If you believe there's a little picture of a man in your DNA or a "blueprint" or a text description or whatever it's all wrong Your body is the result of a series of accidental processes that happened throughout your life, your DNA is just one of them
2 replies 1 retweet 23 likes
This idea that God actually wrote DNA with a purpose in mind creeps into people's language all the time "Genetically he's normal but something 'went wrong in the womb'", etc
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Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
The key thing it has in common with the homunculus theory, the one thing that needs to be debunked and shoved out of people's minds, is this idea of an "intended human body" that was "written into your DNA" that it's possible to "deviate" from
2 replies 4 retweets 20 likes -
Replying to @arthur_affect @sophienotemily and
This isn't even primarily of concern to trans activism but to other people dealing with biological essentialism more directly, like disability activists or intersex activists But it's used as an indirect attack on trans people ("convincing people to mutilate their perfect body")
1 reply 2 retweets 16 likes - Show replies
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