Enough with the DNA Already

Don't get me wrong.  I like DNA.  It is very handy if you want to grow some skin cells after a sunburn or want to keep your hair (and good luck with that).  Of course, DNA also runs cancer but no one or thing is perfect.

Which brings me to Enough Already.

Bio 101 helped me understood why my wife looked more like a cute Genny Khan than Lara Flynn Boyle or a Megan Fox tattoo when she (not Megan) was photographed at age two.  Her young looks caused some consternation at home until the milkman proved to be Irish, too.  The whole family came to laugh that DNA weirdness off, but Nina did burn the picture.

I have twin sisters who liked their original DNA so much, they each kept a copy when they split up for the first time.  It may (emphasis supplied) explain why they liked the same dozens of shoes so much they wouldn't share them as readily as a single allele when the split up the second time, packing for college.

DNA, more recently, really soared when it managed to get half the blacks in Southern Illinois out of Joliet.  They got to got there largely because all blacks look alike to the whites in most parts of Illinois.  DNA fueled the Innocence Project which got some guys out in Texas before George Bush could get his hands, or syringes, on them.  Can't argue with that.

Even though I like civil liberty as much as anyone born before the Patriot Act, I don't care if the Feds want to have a Q-tip swab bank with every American, Illegal and Islamist radical in it.  DNA is sort of like Television and the Internet... and the Q-tip for that matter:  It was not invented until after the ink had faded to fuzzy on the Bill of Rights, so it is not protected from the Scaliaists by the Fourth Amendment. 

DNA and television are joined at David Caruso's hip.  We wouldn't have had the original "CSI" without DNA and where would David be now.  Outside of Prime Time, DNA helps catch rapists and killers whether they the raped or killed years ago or last week.  Depending on who you are, that is great or very troubling news.

But all that is over, now, for me.  I can't sleep and not because I am very troubled.  Yesterday, I found out The Big O is practically a twelth cousin of Big Brown (perhaps explaining the nickname connection).  The Hawaiian whose very father came from Kenya and who lived in Indonesia is related to a comman Massachusetts fellow who probably had never even seen Rhode Island until he drove that lame green pickup down I-95 to Washington DC.  And just in time to conjure the long-dead filibuster, at that.

Please, stop with the DNA already.  Everyone seems to want to trace their DNA back to... well, I'm not sure we all have the same agenda on that score.  Even before gene sequencing, I knew that I was related to half of St Paul, Minnesota (not, mind you, Minneapolis, my mother insisted) and most likely all of Transylvania.  I did not make the latter up, but might have if I had had the chance.

Some great, if obviously liberal and scientific, documentaries on PBS or the History Channel chased DNA all around the damned place.  It was hard and time-consuming because the chase required jamming an electron microscope along with cameras into the bed of a green pickup.  Mitochondrial DNA leads us back to an "Eve" in, by the way, Kenya ("The Big E"?).  Not Massachusetts.  The Y Chromosome project traced most of us guys back to Central Asia, but that may be because Genghis Khan was all over the place, too, and spilled more DNA than your neighborhood milkman.

And how the Big E thing work?  All of her kin descended from her, so where did the guys find the right girl?  In the same neighborhood bar?  The same hut, even?  Didn't we used to fear that beautiful cousin because inbreeding leads to genetic abnormalities like two-headed babies with different colored hair, unstoppable hemorrhaging, and hideous mental defects.  (Finally, Congress explained!)

Genghis Khan, I can live with.  I sort of did quite happily for a long time, at least photographically.  Being related to the Kenyan Big E is fine by me, too.  But I will, and hereby, do draw the line at being a cousin of either Newt Gingrich or Megan Fox.

For very different reasons.