The Genome in Chains

Biomass: the total mass of biological material in a given space.

I’ve always liked that concept. You hear it in permaculture a lot…this plant produces more biomass, ecosystem edges teem with it, generate biomass to regenerate a landscape, etc.

Biomass is life, quantified.

Sometimes I wonder if you could look at human genetic material the same way. Imagine the total weight of the human genome…billions of copies, stretching across continents and centuries…stacked like cordwood. What percentage of that mass, that genetic biomass, came from people who were free? Not politically free…biologically free. Emotionally free. Cognitively free…

Not much.

How much of the DNA currently in circulation came through bodies that were coerced, owned, bred, conscripted, suppressed, raped, or systematically tamed?

My guess? Most of it.

Let’s talk some bleak history.

Chattel slavery wasn’t a one-off horror…it was a civilizational feature for thousands of years. From Sumer to Rome to the cotton fields of Georgia…it was a foundation.

Female reproductive coercion…rape, forced breeding, marriage as transaction…was the norm.

Serfdom, debt bondage, child labor…also not freak events. These were normal life for most people, for most of human civilization.

Throw in conscription, arranged marriage, and forced settlement. All designed to control reproduction and to channel genes in service of a system (not the individual).

And then there’s caste, colonization, and mass incarceration…all of which reshaped survival odds, mating patterns, and the filtering of traits.

And when I ask, What made it into the gene pool? I’m not just asking about biology…I’m asking about systemic conditioning. Because the traits that made survival possible under the conditions I listed above…obedience, emotional detachment, suppression, tolerance for unreality/contradiction…got passed on. They had to. That traits that didn’t? Coherence. Sensitivity. “Wildness.” Embodied distress in response to insanity. These got culled. Not completely, but enough to shift the signal.

Civilization is domestication…by volume. It tames populations. It edits the genome the same way it edits forests…selectively…for yield…for compliance.

We’re left with a species that wears its captivity in its genes. Shaped by submission…adaptation to cages. A genome that might just be a palimpsest of captivity.