The Genetic Self: Debunking DNA

How DNA became confused with destiny, and what's really going on instead.

The Cultural Misconception of DNA

The famous double-helix structure of DNA was revealed in 1953 — in the middle of an era of extraordinary scientific and technological discovery.

Eight years earlier, the Manhattan Project had successfully produced two atomic bombs while sixteen years later, NASA landed men on the moon. In other words, the discovery of the structure of DNA happened at a time when the industrialized ideal of scientific and technological control systems were in ascendance.

In particular, the atomic and space programs exemplified what could be accomplished by large, centralized, directed science and technology research programs. It was the zenith of the industrial revolution, and it organized knowledge in the service of the factories that produced the wealth necessary to finance it.

When confronted with the challenge of making sense of DNA, industrialists relied on industrial metaphors. In this view, DNA was characterized as the “mold” that gives shape to the biochemical products produced by the factory that is the body (e.g., Carey 2011). Given the illusion of top-down hierarchical control that dominated industrialized society, the genetic endowment encoded in DNA made sense to scientists as a sort of biochemical command center.

The importance of this technological metaphor cannot be overstated. By the time I became a schoolchild, it was ensconced in public and popular education. For example, a 1979 Schoolhouse Rock produced two cartoon music videos that were supposed to teach children about the essential workings of their bodies. You could argue that the songwriters knew children were already familiar with technological systems, so they made use of machine analogies to explain the body in terms familiar to children.

The most obvious example is in the chorus of The Body Machine, where the analogy is made explicit in an attempt to explain nutrition.

I’m a machine
You’re a machine
Everybody that you know
You know, they are machines
To keep your engine running you need energy
For your high-powered, revved-up Body Machine

The point is that it was very common then to make sense of complex biological processes by reducing them to technological constructs. But the machine metaphor was more than trying to use something familiar (automobiles and gas stations) to explain something unfamiliar (metabolism). It also suggested that human beings are, or should be, biologically prepared to conform to the hierarchical, authoritarian governance structures that the factory demands.

Telling schoolchildren that they are “machines” was not about preparing them to plan healthy, nutritious meals. It was preparing them to accept instruction from their industrial overseers, as if it were their biological destiny.

What better way to prepare a workforce to work as part of the machinery, than to convince them that they are machinery?

Charlie Chaplin’s 1936 silent film Modern Times is a satirical critique of the dehumanization of the modern worker. In one famous scene, Chaplin’s Tramp character is subsumed by the machine. Once extracted, he is irrevocably altered by the trauma of the experience. He exhibits a pathological obsession with wrench-twisting and his identification as a worker causes him to seek refuge from the police in the same factory that abused him.

Decades later, the popular explanation of genetics was both reinforced by and enlisted in the service of industrial expectations. The machine metaphor positions DNA as the central control structure of the body’s biochemical factory, governing growth and development of the body like floor managers direct production workers who have no choice but to comply. In this model, the the brain is understood to govern the electrical systems of the body, but the DNA is often described as the holding the orders to which the material structures must conform.

This mechanistic model of human beings gets more complicated when it comes explaining to human behavior. Here, theories of the mind conflict with theories of the gene. Operant conditioning was already well established in psychology prior to the discovery of genes and, in the extreme, conditioning theory posits that people are nothing but moist, reward-seeking robots, programmed in their brain by their experiences (i.e., Nurture). Although DNA endowed these robot bodies with certain differentiating aesthetic or morphological features, conditioning theory supposed that human beings were born as blank slates, onto which expectations and motivations would be written by experiences with reward and punishment.

At the opposite extreme of the Nurture theory was genetic determinism, which holds that the brain itself is a product of DNA, and therefore designed in accordance with the genetic blueprint. In this way, the DNA formed at the moment of our conception governs the whole circumstances of our lives (i.e., Nature). Biographical accounts describing remarkable similarities between identical twins separated at birth seem to reinforce this view.

Both ideas are garbage.

The Nurture theory serves the Masters of the Industrial Revolution well by suggesting that human workers can be programmed for reliable behavior by structuring appropriate rewards and punishments. By contrast, the Nature theory challenges models of operant control, but also offers upper classes some consolation by allowing them to invent racist pseudo-scientific justifications for wealth, status, and decades (if not centuries) of genocidal exploitation.

In any case, the Industrial Revolution stalled in the face of a series of political, economic, and technological crises in the 1970’s. It was soon superseded by the Information Revolution, and thus the technological metaphor was not retired. Neither was the fascination with massive, government-sponsored, centrally-controlled science and technology projects predicated on the illusion of central control.

It was the fantasy of genetic fatalism that supported the Human Genome Project, which promised to decode the whole of human DNA and enable genetic engineers to redesign the human body to correct defects and extend life — perhaps indefinitely. According to then President Bill Clinton:

The effort to decipher the human genome... will be the scientific breakthrough of the century - perhaps of all time.

— President Bill Clinton, 14 March 2000

It’s been twenty-two years since. You can now get your entire DNA sequenced for under $1000, and there is nothing in our current health care experience that suggests we are any healthier or longer-lived as a result.

DNA is not a master controller of the chemical factory and never was. In fact, once the Human Genome Project was completed, scientists remain baffled by the fact that most of 3.4 billion nucleotides in DNA don’t seem to do anything at all. That is, they are not involved in controlling protein synthesis, which means their function remains a mysterious obstacle to their re-engineering.

The Decentralization of DNA

While the industrialized metaphor is insidious and incorrect, it has the advantage of being simple.

The truth of your Genetic Self is more complex.

More recent research has revealed several of these complexities:

• Epigenetics. The DNA in your genome can be turned on and off, so that the expression of your genome can be altered in response to your environment and experience. The study of gene expression is called epigenetics, and it includes both the chemical mechanisms by which genes can be masked (i.e., switched off) and the consequences of that masking. In theory, epigenetic adaptations in response to experience confer an evolutionary advantage by coding chemical responses to the environment directly into genetic expression. However, epigenomic expression is persistent, which means that the alteration in gene expression can extend well past the duration of the experience. It can even be passed down to subsequent generations. That is, it could be that our bodies are epigentically programmed by our grandparents’ experiences. This realization has profound implications for understanding neurobiological and metabolic disorders, given the possibility that the epigenomic adaptations that served our ancestors well may now be maladaptive in a modern context.

• Mitochondrial DNA. In addition to nucleic DNA, you inherit another set of DNA — but only from your Mother. Inside every cell of your body is an organelle called the mitochondria. In fact, most cells in your body have thousands of them. The mitochondria are the site of energy conversion — where glucose and fats are oxidized to produce energy for fueling movement, growth, and every bodily function. Although mitochondria rely on nucleic DNA to perform many functions, they must respond fast to urgent demands for energy — like fighting or running. The speed with which the mitochondria must respond to threats demands that they have the capacity to synthesize their own enzymes and hormones at the site of energy conversion, rather than wait for these critical molecules to be synthesized in the nucleus and transported to the mitochondria. For example, scientists recently discovered that mitochondria synthesize their own melatonin. They think the melatonin helps protect mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) from damage during intense periods of energy conversion (Reiter et al. 2020). Protecting the integrity of mDNA is critically important to maintaining quality of life, because mitochondrial disorders are associated with a myriad of diseases, including: chronic fatigue, diabetes, heart disease, and Parkinson’s. So far, it is not clear how mitochondrial dysfunction might reliably be corrected. Although mitochondrial production mechanisms contain selection and error correction mechanisms to remove faulty mDNA, current theory suggests that damage to mDNA is irreversible, inexorable, and amounts to the mechanism by which ageing occurs.

• Microbiome. Most of the DNA on which your body relies to perform biochemical functions doesn’t even belong to you. For example, there are an estimated 500 times more encoding genes in the bacteria in your gut than in the nucleus of your cells (Yong 2016). These bacteria not only detoxify and make digestible certain foods, but they also produce essential hormones, vitamins, and psycho-active chemicals that can create food cravings or behavioral impulses. We depend on them to such extent that disorders in our microbiome manifest as disease, including: acne, allergies, autism, cancer, cavities, digestive and metabolic disorders, depression and anxiety, ecezma, ulcers, and obesity. Fortunately, the microbiome changes fast — on the order of days. For example, fecal transplants from healthy subjects have resolved pathologies such as antibiotic resistant infection and autism (Alhathi et al. 2022). There are several strategies for maintaining a well-functioning microbiome. They fall into two categories: prebiotics that feed and maintain a healthy microbiome, and probiotics that contain the microorganisms themselves. Historical trends indicate that microbiome diversity declines as societies become more modern and industrialized. The implication is this lack of diversity accounts for the increased rate of microbiome disease and disorder among western, industrialized populations.

These new revelations in epigenetics, mitochondria, and microbiome demonstrate that there is no single “master controller” of biochemical synthesis in the human body. Instead, the biochemistry of the body is a complex web of interaction between multiple sources of genetic information that include experiences and environmental exposures.

Understanding these interactions and how they relate to thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and motives — including those in your children — may be the key to reprogramming them so that we can have closer approximations of the lives we want.

In contrast, theories of genetic fatalism propagate misconceptions about the degree of agency we may exercise in our own self-determination and may lead to a dangerous despondency that the matters which dictate the quality of our lives are beyond our influence.