Reading meatphors in DNA (and RNA): a bio-rhetorical view of genetic text metaphors

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ABSTRACT The ongoing digitization of biological life rests in part on the idea of genetic information being contained in genetic texts written in the four-letter language of DNA. Genetic text metaphors have been criticized for being inaccurate, misleading, and outdated. They are also inescapable, malleable, and remarkably generative for engineering biology. Yet problematic understandings of genetic texts as containing information do not inhere in the metaphor but rather depend on particular ways of understanding how texts work – in particular, thinking about texts as containing information as shaped by cybernetic redefinitions of information. The concept of meatphor, analogizing biomolecular relations to discursive relations described through metaphor, enables rethinking those metaphors through a bio-rhetorical approach. Doing so foregrounds how nucleic acids make meaningful relationships in context over how they contain deterministic or controlling information. That approach distinguishes between how human readers have tended to make meanings with genetic texts and how molecules that interact with or ‘read’ texts do so, opening up underexplored ways to think about those metaphors. Through this lens, meatphor becomes one strategy to attend to how diverse meanings may be made with genetic text metaphors themselves, with consequences for bioengineering and societal practices.