I appreciate this wild vein of thinking, that "junk" DNA (or something else) might contain old data. In America and Americans, John Steinbeck made an even bolde

I appreciate this wild vein of thinking, that "junk" DNA (or something else) might contain old data. In America and Americans, John Steinbeck made an even bolder guess he knew might be wrong: that "junk" DNA was partly used to store memories, and pass them on between generations. He imagined that Americans might be better gun-fighters than Europeans simply due to the recent history of gun-violence in the American Old West (which he may have been exaggerating in his head). I don't put any stock in that idea, but I liked it as a thought. Another mechanism we know is used for allowing more than one pattern to be saved is the methylation of DNA. My understanding (IANABiologist) is that certain chunks of DNA are essentially commented out based on environmental factors. Eusocial insects use this to grow different castes with radically different bodies and behaviors from a shared set of basic DNA; besides the metagenetics, you can't tell the DNA of a worker wasp apart from that of a queen. I'm not saying humans have metagenetic castes to this degree, but it's not hard to imagine some related traits getting commented on and off together through some mechanism. I know some researchers now think there might be a whole other level of commentary, or a different track of information entirely, encoded in how the DNA is folded. That research is still pretty new and doesn't know where it's going, IIRC.