Am I missing something? This is a link to an article where a bunch of scientists and public intellectuals answer the question, and it provides all kinds of cool content, such as "impedance matching", and the notion that natural selection implies that our DNA can tell us about the environments our genetic ancestors lived in.

Instead of reading, reacting, or engaging with any of those ideas, people are just directly responding to the headline as though this is an ask HN thread. I'm not sure that that's what was intended here?

I would love to hear people talk about this "genetic book of the dead" idea. For instance, the terrifying drowning reflex that people have, there must have been scenarios in our evolutionary past where that happened often enough that this mutation came in handy, which is haunting to think about. I would love for this thread to be a discussion of the ideas presented in the article.