The Structure of DNA
nature.com
nature.com
-In the past people found it "morally upsetting" that no matter how smart you are or no matter how hard you work, that doesn't matter to the DNA you pass down to your kids.
But if you think about inheritance not about DNA as a whole, but rather as the frequency of expression of individual genes, you see that you can affect the future gene pool throughout your life that can affect the expression of "your" genes in the gene pool as a whole.
Example: You are shakespeare, you pass down the inheritance of your genes NOT through procreation, but through the creation of artistic work which affects the genetic expression of genes in the gene pool to give certain genes just a little bit of an advantage over others. This tiny change in frequency has an enormous affect over hundreds of generations.
How do you affect the genetic expression of genes in the gene pool by a book? -Think about all the people that read that book, and how it affected them and their procreation, and you get the idea.
That may not be true entirely true — in addition to passing on your DNA, you also pass on epigenetic "on" and "off" switches that determine gene expression. Most notably, this has been found to have three-generation effects following famine — an experience that "shouldn't" affect DNA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...
I myself always wonder about "Genetic memory" and the idea about how certain instincts/intuition are past down in genetics.
Moreover, allthough your behaviour does not influence the DNA, your behaviour does influence the behavior of your kids obviously. DNA is not everything. and then there is epi-genetics, the health of your procreational cells etc...
This isn't genetics! It's a messaging side channel in an unboundedly complex domain.
Manifested behaviors might be impacting millions of unrelated factors in other individuals that won't necessarily involve the same genes as the originating party. You're throwing a rock into a pond and trying to imagine why some ducks produce more ducklings.
For instance, some people have genes that lead them to be marginally worse drivers (ADHD, color blindness, alcoholism, ...). There will be a small increase in automotive deaths because of them. But how do their genes impact the gene pool vis a vis their bad driving?
Let's say you do select something specific. Let's say a new Hitler wants to kill all blue-eyed people. Does their desire to do so arise from genetic factors, or is it learned behavior? (Perhaps aspects of this desire do - psychopathic behavior, the want to kill, ...) How do we even begin model that in a useful way like we do with other epigenetic effects such as DNA methylation?
Changing the fitness landscape isn't genetics. Individuals procreating at differential rates under the new landscape is. You're proposing a new field that we don't have the sensors, math or compute time to model, and it's uncertain that we'd derive useful signal from the high dimensionality and noise.
Lets go with the Hilter example since I think this is an interesting thought experiment.
Was Hitler a failure? (From his evolutionary perspective.)
At first glance you would say yes, obviously. He had no kids, he killed himself and was probably very unhappy and distraught with how things turned out in the end. The very people he thought were the "best" in his society actually suffered the most (as defined by him as he said "all the best have already died in Germany").
Now, if you think about it as a kid who was born with almost no family structure, no inheritance, and not very competitive in terms of capability compared to his peers (He wasn't a good architect, he wasn't a good painter, most of the esoteric things that he tried at he failed). I don't think its a stretch to suppose he thought his environment didn't bring favorable advantages for him (and others) and he sought a remedy to this. What did his remedy amount to?
The destruction of a large part of genes from the gene pool. And what where the genes that were largely removed composed of? You could argue he was wildly successful in influencing the genetic frequency of expression of a certain types of genes, while suppressing others.
It isn't? There might be a reason that gen- and gno- (~know) are so similar roots