gene pool

Millet plays with the title and with the idea of atavism, in which an ancient trait asserts itself by skipping forward a few generations to suddenly appear in the gene pool.

As journalist Naomi Klein documented in her book "Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World," the pandemic gave rise to large numbers of people arguing that infectious disease is good because it supposedly culls the weak from the gene pool.

Additionally, ancient adaptation signals can be masked by genetic drift -- random fluctuations in the frequency that genes appear -- and population mixing, which causes certain adaptive traits to disappear from the gene pool.

Imagine the gene pool of a species as a deck of cards.

But genetic traits are often associated with a person’s social identity – treating certain traits as unwanted in the human gene pool can be deeply discriminatory.