It seems that "genetics" is increasingly becoming the essentialism of the 21st century. Because you now sound silly if you use words like 'soul' or 'energy', pe

It seems that "genetics" is increasingly becoming the essentialism of the 21st century. Because you now sound silly if you use words like 'soul' or 'energy', people increasingly rely on 'genetics' or 'biology' to prove all sorts of political points or argue for public policies. As someone whose job is literally staring at and manipulating fasta files [1][2] all day, I find this newly found fascination people have with their own DNA (and others') deeply unsettling. People want it to be our 'source code', our 'blueprint', our video game character starting stats, any kind of proxy for one's soul, but there's so much more to the self than a dumb fasta file, we're only barely beginning to uncover it. And I'm not talking about the environment either (and by the way, the genetics/environment false dichotomy has been outdated for a while; whenever I hear things like 'nature/nurture' it makes me cringe). Epigenetics, microbiota, DNA spatial structure, all sorts of developmental stuff... these all contribute too, and have little to do with one's 'upgringing' or 'nurturing' as most people understand it. It's all the more pervasive because some of the talking points are sort of true, but then people immediately jump to conclusions regarding social issues. Which in my view shows that people are not really interested in the science itself but are more looking into a way to map their mental model onto it so as to provide a socially acceptable justification of their opinions. This has been done for hundreds of years (from racialist theories to Lyssenkism to all kinds of foodstuffs lobbies) and I would very much like it if there weren't a resurgence of this kind of thinking in the current political climate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTA_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTA_format [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FASTQ_format