After 32 generations (~800 years) you have more genealogical ancestors than there are base pairs in human DNA. There literally isn’t enough resolution to store a “record” of each of your ancestors, even if you inherited exactly 1 base pair from each ancestor.

Additional complications make it an even shorter timeline. After about 8 generations, you share no more DNA with your ancestors than you do with a random stranger.

Politically this should be more well known. Of course, racists and fascists rely on “blood quantum” arguments to justify racial or ethnic oppression. But they don’t invent this idea of strict genetic identity. It’s latent in the population.

Leftists should more frequently call out genetic tests like 23andMe as inherently racist because it’s based in race science nonsense. It may not be as obvious as Nazis invoking aryan genes or whatever; but it’s still just as incorrect when your aunt at Thanksgiving talks about how she discovered she’s 2% Choctaw or whatever

pickle-liz

  • Hexboare [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    Mate the chuds and creationists are uniquely your country’s fucking problem

    You’ve constructed a straw man from this:

    he describes everything about life as just a means for DNA to propagate itself. As if DNA isn’t merely a component in a larger, more complex and complicated system, but as the reason for the whole thing.

    It’s been decades since I read it but the selfish gene was absolutely full of this genre supremacist shit and his evo-psych trash clearly infects all his views

    • Mate the chuds and creationists are uniquely your country’s fucking problem

      White supremacist right-wingers are uniquely a US problem? I’d agree they’re uniquely powerful in the US but that’s a major reason why the US is “uniquely” the world’s problem. What a strange take to read here, that chuds are only something USians need to be concerned about.

      You’ve constructed a straw man from this

      That makes no sense. I’m not attacking anything, so there is no strawman to create. You just quoted someone else who said something that Dawkins himself never said, so it seems pretty obvious where the strawman is and who is creating it.

      It’s been decades since I read it but the selfish gene was absolutely full of this genre supremacist shit

      “Gene supremacist”? lol, what even is that? Understanding how genes replicate is not “gene supremacist shit,” it’s scientific consensus. “The matter of the world around us is made up of atoms and their interactions? That’s just atomic supremacist shit.” These sentences have no meaning.

      his evo-psych trash clearly infects all his views

      To the extent he believes in evo-psych, I’m sure it does effect his views, some of which I explicitly addressed. That doesn’t invalidate the real science, which despite being a terrible person, he has also done and made contributions to. He’s hardly the only scientist who had a lot of shit views on other topics, that’s even the majority. Plenty of them think their expertise on one topic makes them an authority on others and they are wrong, and Dawkins is one of these as well. That doesn’t make him wrong about how genes work or the broader biology and it certainly doesn’t make the premise of The Selfish Gene wrong.