Read the post again. Nothing of the sort was written, but I appreciate the critique and encourage more critique if you are inclined.

Here is how I would respond to your observation:

You are correct that rna != dna. But, you also know and deliberately leave out that we don't fully understand the following:

dna --> dna experssion machinare --> ?? effects ??

How many branches to these mechanims are tehere? How many logical loopbacks are there? How many branches have indiriect effects on related expression mechanism? How does universal rendomness (happy accidents leading to good / bad / good / bad --> eventually lucky mutations that happen at just the right time in just the right place) happen?

I do not believe for one minute that we fully understand the effects of messing with the machinery that creates / maintains and repairs humans. I am also proposing a perspective that it is not entirely appropriate to make the distinction between dna as pure data storage and rna and other mechanism involved in the expression / repair / duplication of that data as separate entities.

You are right, we aren't messing with dna, but rna. But so what? How do we know there isn't a loopback side effect that will eventually cause mutations in a chain of sedeffects that could affect genetics?

That is just trying to explore the issues from your perspective which is from the inside out, looking at the problem from the perspective of the dna out to the real world.

Let's look at the problem from the perspective of the outside world looking into the genome: epigenetics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

We now know that the human genome is not merely self evolving, we now know that the environment around us can embed information in our genome directly. The environment can change our genome. I'm not a geneticist, feel free to take my perspective appart and show me where I'm wrong, I'm not claiming authority, nor am I claiming any great isnight.

But WE NOW KNOW and have some great examples from studies of isolated genetic groups in the uk and the nordic countries where we can directly point to evidence of epigenetics embedding new information into our genome and those populations passing on the new genetic information to their children.

You are correct my concern is flawed on all sorts of levels of detail, so feel free to add and let's build out the concern into something more accurate and valid.

BUT, as someone that codes in common lisp, a programming language that has HOMOICONICITY + MACROS built into the programming language such that you can write programs that look at them selves and modify their own code in ways that remarkably look like self replicating genetic mechanisms, you start to get frightened by the possible consequences real fucking fast. Yeah, maybe we aren't directly affecting dna. Then again, maybe we are. We are on one level purely dna, but on another level, expression of dna, feedback loops, unexpected consequences, epigenetics ... yeah, when we start messing with this stuff I propose that we are actually messing with the globally shared human source code.

And, yes, I know you will point out that inactivated virus based vaccines could have the same effect. I acknowledge that as well, our genome is full of foreign retroviruses injecting their source code into our genome according to scientists.

I'm just telling one thing, I KNOW THE CONSEQUENCES OF HUMANS FUCKING WITH SOURCE CODE. We are NOT good at it. We have no good tools for this stuff, our brains are not built for this stuff and more importantly, we have no way to back it out.

I guess, I hope that expands a bit on what I said, feel free to chop up anything I said and recombine it into something more accurate. I wouldn't mind hearing your thoughts on this.

If DNA is like code on disk then RNA is like code in RAM. So no, you're not editing your DNA when you poke around with RNA, but it's code nonetheless, and it gets mixed in with your other code. What's your uptime, BTW? When's your next reboot from disk? Does it really matter that mRNA doesn't edit our DNA?