A global conspiracy

Only fools deny that a powerful establishment with exorbitant privilege controls Duke University, the United States and the world. Agents of this entity are shockingly overrepresented wherever life may be found, influencing all actions, policies, ideas and beliefs. Four billionagenarian elders—Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine and Guanine—lead it, and they have successfully infiltrated all organisms.

By consorting in dark nuclei, they make genes, which in turn make human beings so that they may reproduce themselves. Some members of our community, however, remain ignorant of their true oppressors. Or perhaps they are simply bad spellers. After all, both “JEW” and “DNA” have three letters. But old habits of thought die hard, and—as anyone who’s ever kicked one can attest—beating the addiction becomes far easier if it can be replaced with something else. Why not anti-geneticism?

The most important goal of our genes is, as biologist E.O. Wilson points out, to be spread “with the least possible biochemical perturbation,” and to do this they make us mortal and prone to having screaming horrors known colloquially as children. And because of this we should hate them. For those of us who are worried about meeting the Giant Owl who set off the big bang (don’t make fun of my religious beliefs, you prick), dying is not good at all—albeit faintly more appealing than the thought of having a toddler. DNA invented mortality and pregnancy to serve its ends, not ours. After a while, it tells our cells to stop dividing and we die. It also produces neurotransmitters that con us into “falling in love” and having sex and enduring the miserable mewling and puking child that ensues.

Our genes do many other wicked things, like urging us to devour pie, guzzle Coke and sit around because fat, sugar and not wasting energy were very good things back when we were evolving, but certainly aren’t now. Selective pressures have changed, changed utterly. Now it is a good thing to eat salad, wear condoms and go jogging. Unfortunately, our neural machinery is not built for any of this, so we don’t and wind up fat, constipated and itchy.

Our genes also encourage stupidity. As was amply illustrated last week in a vague column about “The Jews” and at the Palestine Solidarity Movement conference when a Duke professor tried to argue for a “moral equivalence” between Israel and apartheid South Africa, humans have a predisposition to jump to false conclusions, recognize phony patterns, make fallacious analogies and just plain think sloppily.

Natural selection, sadly, does not select for truth. It operates on one principle alone—reproductive success. In short, if you are good at surviving and reproducing, it doesn’t matter what you believe, and that’s the way your genes want it. One can easily see how this tendency bodes ill for critical thinking skills in the population when, overwhelmingly, the religiously inclined have the most children.

By now you should be able to see the unmistakable, helical silhouette of the real global conspiracy: The gangs of nucleic acids that use us as carriers and copiers. If you are going to be prejudiced, it makes more sense to be virulently anti-genetic than anti-Semitic.

Genes, not Jews, oppress you. In fact, there is much to admire about Jewish culture, and we would do well to copy the hard work and valorization of education that, when coupled with high intelligence, allows Jews to enjoy “shocking overrepresentation” in prestigious universities. Blaming the children of Moses, Maimonides and Mendelssohn for defending their values and for succeeding in America is wrong and it misses the mark. In the end, a single molecule enslaves us all. But together we can find ways to thwart its plots and make our lives better by inventing synthetic donuts, virtual reality kingdoms and rationality medication for Chronicle columnists. For the Edisons among us, these will be the projects of the 21st century.