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The ad for Ancestry.com’s DNA testing company is not only selling me a service, it is selling me an ideology: Submitting my DNA, it said, you would “answer, once and for all, what it is that makes you, you.” Really? DNA makes me me? This is pseudo-scientific garbage. DNA is the score, not the performance. Who we are – as opposed to what we are – depends on upbringing, education, what’s in the environment, opportunities for physical and intellectual growth, and just plain luck.
I’m not saying anything new to sociologists. They have known this ever since Susan Lindee and Dorothy Nelkin wrote DNA Mystique exactly 20 years ago. These researchers warned us that we were creating “sacred DNA.”
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And they were correct. We are starting to believe our advertising. Governor Michael Huckabee claims “we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception. The reason we know that it is is because of the DNA schedule that we now have clear scientific evidence on.” However, there’s no such schedule. Carly Fiorina says, “Science is on our side. It shows … the DNA on the day that we die is the same DNA we had as a zygote.” Actually, it isn’t.
Read full, original post: DNA As Our Soul: Don’t Believe the Advertising
