“forget your Platonic essentialism”

“…each of us is a composite, comprising myriad cells, each cell with its own genome, many of those genomes acquiring aberrations all their own and diverging, click by click of the mutational ratchet, from the DNA in the zygote from which we have grown. So forget your Platonic essentialism when it comes to human identity. We are jumbles, as Khamsi variously illustrates. That’s why I called Beyond Inheritance a crosscutting book. It cuts across disciplines and diseases, across fortunate accidents and piteous dilemmas, across time and across scale, to remind us of the wisdom of Heraclitus: the ultimate constant is change.” David Quammen, Song of the Cell, NYRB