who cares about DNA anyway?

[Marjorie Pfennig]

I was watching this program in Aus (where i live) last night called "Dna Nation" which is about three celebrities (Ernie Dingo, Julia Zemiro and IanThorpe) who have their DNA taken and their heritage traced back 2000,000 years.  It's quite interesting but they kept talking about how DNA tells you "where you come from" and "who you are."

i don't know about all of you but while i find it interesting i don't think it tells me a lot about who i am.

[Gord Barentsen]

I saw it last weekend. One thing that stood out to me was that they were really really pushing genetics and science as the way to find out "who you are."  I guess they have to do that as part of the show's intrinsic self-promotion, but as someone sensitized to the at times overprivileging of science in Western culture it always rubs me the wrong way.

[Marjorie Pfennig]

i think you're harder on the show than i am  but i agree..like what bearing does it have on my life if there was a serial killer in my family?!

[Graham Barnett]

I agree...well, it's hard for me to imagine what my response might be if I had an ancestor who was a serial killer or rapist or something like that, but in general, why should I care about what my ancestors did?

[Gord Barentsen]

On 20/06/2016 at 8:17 PM, Marjorie Pfennig said:

what bearing does it have on my life if there was a serial killer in my family?!

I think one can say this logically, but nevertheless I think there are lots of people who are rather superstitious about what goes on in their family lines - irrespective of what "science" has to say (another way of saying that people invoke "post-truth realativism" when it suits their prejudices!).  In other words, there are distinctly religious dimensions to familialism (if that's a good word for it).

I wonder if psychology really is the ur-"science" Freud and Jung thought it was - personal psychology seems to trump(!) objectivity as the predominant paradigm through which "truth" is filtered.  Except that the way most people deal with their own personal psychologies I'd hardly call it "scientific."

[ruby]

On ‎20‎/‎06‎/‎2016 at 8:17 PM, Marjorie Pfennig said:

what bearing does it have on my life if there was a serial killer in my family?!

but I mean how do we know that it doesn't have any bearing?  maybe "serial-killer"ness is part of an evolutionary adaptation?

[Gord Barentsen]

I was talking about DNA with someone just recently and telling them the story below reminded me of this thread.

I seem to rememeber reading something about how someone who underwent a complete marrow transplant ended up having two - count 'em, two sets of DNA in his body!  That would mean that a tissue sample from this person would return one set of DNA and a marrow (or blood?) sample would return a different one entirely.  I wonder the degree to which this throws the proverbial wrench into simple forms of DNA identification?