The selection of my topic was motivated by the high stakes that our understanding of biology has come to have on a variety of levels. Intellectually, in its impact on the humanities, arts, and human sciences; ethically, in its formative effect on human identities and our underlying interpretation of what it means to be human; and socially, with respect to the defining, normalizing, and pathologizing of human difference. The title What Genes Can’t Do is meant to recall What Computers Can’t Do by Hubert Dreyfus and to suggest, by analogy, my aspiration to influence a powerful social-technical trend by way of a philosophically guided, empirically argued critique.