{"id":10239,"date":"2018-05-29T16:14:19","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T15:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/?p=10239"},"modified":"2018-05-30T06:28:15","modified_gmt":"2018-05-30T05:28:15","slug":"an-explanation-of-heredity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2018\/05\/an-explanation-of-heredity\/","title":{"rendered":"An explanation of heredity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An explanation of heredity can be found at the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/story\/maybe-dna-cant-answer-all-our-questions-about-heredity\/?mbid=social_twitter\">Wired interview<\/a> of <a href=\"https:\/\/de.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Carl_Zimmer_(Publizist)\">Carl Zimmer.<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>People have been trying to use genetics as a form of identification for a very long time. Of course they didn\u2019t always call it that. DNA is just a modern substitute for the old idea of blood. But in many ways it hasn\u2019t evolved much from the time we thought of ancestry as a pure substance. We still say \u201cI\u2019ve got some Irish blood in me,\u201d but it\u2019s not like you can take out just the Irish blood and fill a cup with it. It\u2019s the same with the bits of DNA in your genome that came from people that once lived in that part of the world. We\u2019re all an amalgam of fragments that have all traveled different paths and each only influences us in very subtle ways.\u00a0What we really want from heredity is an explanation of why we are the way we are, and genes alone can\u2019t give us that. There are other things we inherit that matter just as much\u2014like the chemical modifications to our DNA that turn genes on and off or the microbes that abound in our bodies or the human-made environments we\u2019re born into. We literally pass down the whole world to our children, and right now our children are inheriting climate change.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This is clearly an argument against the European genetic exceptionalism. But even accepting that argument to a large extent, I do not understand why Zimmer uploaded now the genomes of his children Charlotte and Veronica for public viewing? Because it is largely irrelevant?<\/p>\n\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<div class=\"bottom-note\">\n  <span class=\"mod1\">CC-BY-NC Science Surf , accessed 13.04.2026<\/span>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An explanation of heredity can be found at the Wired interview of Carl Zimmer. People have been trying to use genetics as a form of identification for a very long time. Of course they didn\u2019t always call it that. DNA is just a modern substitute for the old idea of blood. But in many ways &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/sciencesurf\/2018\/05\/an-explanation-of-heredity\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">An explanation of heredity<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics-biology","category-philosophy-of-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10239"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10239\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10249,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10239\/revisions\/10249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wjst.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}