Our genes have long been ballyhooed as either a death-sentence, or the Midas touch of genius, bestowing upon us pristine health and an agile mind, or the deterministic outcome of cancer, neurological disease, or various other birth ‘defects’, but what if there was something else helping to determine our fate? What if our genes were merely building blocks, and a greater intelligence was in charge of whether or not we can throw a basketball from the free throw line and get nothing but net every time, or die at the age of 46 like every other person in our family’s history, due to a genetic predisposition for cardiac arrest?
Genetic determinism is the idea that genes, to the exclusion of environment or the field of our awareness and experience, determine how an organism turns out. You could call it the extreme version of nature vs. nurture, wherein our DNA tells us everything about what something will be.
