Are we prisoners of our genes ?
ARE WE PRISONERS OF OUR GENES? PDF Version: Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? Introduction It may seem out of place that a political party should publish a pamphlet on an essentially scientific subject. What significance, it may be asked, do advances in our understanding of how heredity works have to do with a political programme aimed at changing the basis of society? The answer is that it is not socialists who have made genes a political issue. It is our opponents whothat the genetic makeup would prevent the establishment of a cooperative, and non,-non-hierarchical society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of wealth production. Scientists had long posited that there had to exist some unit of heritable characteristics, which they called a “gene”, but it was only 50 years ago that Watson and Crick identified what this precisely was and how it was structured. Before that, very few had heard of DNA . Even now, it is not kno...