Rethinking Our Genetics

Or: Why Our Genes All Speak the Same Language

Credit to GDJ (pixabay.com)

This article was written by my good friend Niklas Freund, who is doing his Ph.D. in biochemistry in Cambridge, so all credit goes to him!

The Language of Genetics

Have you ever thought about how unfathomable and at the same time disturbingly beautiful it is that our world knows so many different human languages? It goes without saying that we will never be able to understand all of the manifold tongues out there. The tens of thousands of years of humans developing the linguistic variety of today have seen the growth of an enormous family tree of languages. What makes things even more complex is that different branches of language families use different letter systems — like our Latin letters, the Greek alphabet, the Cyrillic script, hieroglyphs, runes, the Hebrew alphabet, Arabic, Devanagari, Chinese characters, with the list continuing almost endlessly.

Photo by Mark Rasmuson on Unsplash

Within us humans, shaped by evolution rather than culture, lies another language. This one is used not to communicate but to store information — our genetic information. It is our genetic language, our DNA…