Is genetic reductionism shaping our identity?

March 24, 2015 10:27 AM

"What would it mean to live in a society where people seek only the significant same." Reductionist discourses tend to infiltrate both genetic and big data enterprises. Could these discourses imperceptibly close rather than open the prospect for us to decide what we want to become—what we want our futures to be? Could such discourses also “hide rather than reveal the deepest sources of social ills,” which shape the evolution of our genes and identities?
posted by pmfail (9 comments total)

I don't know which site they met on, but my wife and I know a couple in their mid-30s who met online and they seem to like all of the same things. The same bands, the same movies, the same drinks, the same leisure activities, etc. They're both nice people and seem very happy together, but to an outsider it's a bit...uncanny.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:51 AM on March 24, 2015

Isn't the very use of language itself reductionist, really? The only discourse that isn't reductionist is one where no one says anything.
posted by XMLicious at 11:26 AM on March 24, 2015

[[This thread is closed for comments]]
posted by Potomac Avenue at 12:04 PM on March 24, 2015 [2 favorites]

TFA didn't do it for me, but apparently last year Silicon Valley started trying to disrupt our vaginas? How did this not make it into Jonathan Eisen's Overselling The Microbiome awards?
posted by deludingmyself at 1:39 PM on March 24, 2015 [3 favorites]

Isn't the very use of language itself reductionist, really? The only discourse that isn't reductionist is one where no one says anything.

Only if you're speaking Lojban. Most people understand that metaphors are not necessarily literal. Love can be a summer day (Shakespeare), a bumble bee (Memphis Minnie), a tire iron (Ted Nugent), a lion (Neko Case), or the bomp (Barry Mann as referenced by Le Tigre). It's rather hard to do anything in language without messing with contextual meaning and ambiguity, which is one reason why automatic speech recognition as a method of creating subtitles often results in unintentional hilarity.

Language doesn't have to be reductionist, it can be improvisational and expressive. It can be post-impressionistic ala Van Gogh and Seurat creating vibrant texture from the apparent incongruity of individual strokes. I prefer language that has the metaphorical pop and contrast of Shakespeare, Case, or Memphis Minnie than the dreadful demand of pseudo-medical precision that dominates current discourse about sexuality.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:02 PM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

I was kidding, but rather than anything about metaphors I was referring to the way that instead of directly transmitting one's experiences or thoughts, language is a lossy compression of that down into a sequence of symbols that are sort of like labels for Platonic forms rather than direct references to or expressions of "real" things.
posted by XMLicious at 2:15 PM on March 24, 2015

They're kind of collapsing a lot of stuff together, aren't they? Is a blood test for suicide really in the same category as a scented microbiome? For one thing, that blood test actually appears to measure an epigenetic marker as well as a genetic one, so it's measuring that individual's environment and not only heredity -- and for another, better screening for suicide risk hardly seems imperialist in any meaningful sense, as opposed to just good epidemiology. A lot of the other stuff they're talking about (e.g. dating services that match for SNPs that are vaguely associated with personality features) seems more like frivolous snake-oil with a light pseudoscientific dusting of "your genes!!!" than credible ways to shape society.
posted by en forme de poire at 2:19 PM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]

XMLicious: Ack, Poe's law in action. Identity policing using a reductionist theory of language is a big thing in LGBTQ communities at the moment.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:37 PM on March 24, 2015

but apparently last year Silicon Valley started trying to disrupt our vaginas?

That article was more than a bit misleading. The product was developed by a woman and the goal is to "to print a virus [that] kills off the microbes that cause things like yeast infections ." The "bros" don't run the company, they're investors. A clarification blurb from Inc. which ran a similarly sensationalist story: "Hutchinson [The founder of Sweet Peach] was appalled at the implication that Sweet Peach is intended to introduce artificial fragrances into its users' vaginas."
posted by MikeMc at 4:29 PM on March 24, 2015 [1 favorite]