Genes Carrying Memes

The prospect of CRISPR-Cas9 germline editing has many wondering how it will be used on humans. Will there be more Chinese experimental babies? Will there be super babies? Yes, obviously. It is inevitable. How will future generations of cultures interact when some can bestow advantages of health, strength, and intelligence directly to their progeny?

It is already possible to encode arbitrary information into DNA. Humans carry around and propagate non-coding (junk) DNA that does not appear to have a purpose.

Why not replace some of the junk DNA with information deliberately encoded? We could pass messages down to our offspring in their DNA. We could send love notes or family photos or important documents down through generations.

If we can send information that way, we could also embed things that some would find troubling. We would have the same conflicts that the Internet has with the First Amendment, but the information would literally be embedded in every cell of the person. We could embed illegal numbers, banned books, or illegal or terrible images. Memes could be directly encoded in genes. Hitherto, memetics has been running on top of genetics. What happens when people inherit a religious text directly in their genome? Will they be more likely to be infected with that meme?

How will clever capitalists monetize this? What terrible unexpected side-effects will future generations encounter?

Published by Gene McCulley

I dabble in and write about things I find interesting.