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Everything you know about genetics is wrong (Adam Rutherford)

Apr 09, 2020
What I have discovered in the last 10 years is that, compared to subjects like physics, particularly quantum physics or astrophysics, where the concepts are so distant from us as people that they are almost easier to understand, especially it is easier to understand when, when there is revelation or when new discoveries are made, in contrast,

genetics

, human

genetics

, is fundamentally about families, heredity, sex, and these are things that we all experience and think we

know

, and what the What science does is eliminate those prejudices that it eliminates. our, um, the ways that we think we perceive the world and tries to describe how they really are, so in genetics I find that my thesis is that when we talk about heredity, when we talk about genetics, when we talk about families and we talk about sex.
everything you know about genetics is wrong adam rutherford
We come with a load of baggage that has turned out to not be exactly what is true anyway, so the kind of subtitle of this is why we are culturally programmed to misunderstand how genetics works and I'm going to start with a story about this man this is Charles II of Spain so Charles II and he was Charles was the last ruling member of the Habsburg dynasty and the Habsburgs that many of you will

know

from studying genetics and from studying history were the most powerful family in Europe for almost 200 years until 1700, during that time, the Habsburg family provided six Holy Roman Emperors and ruled most of Europe up to the Spanish Peninsula for almost 200 years, but it ended when Charles II died at age 38 in the year 1700, because No He left no sun or air and the reason he did not leave a son or an heir was because he was profoundly disabled.
everything you know about genetics is wrong adam rutherford

More Interesting Facts About,

everything you know about genetics is wrong adam rutherford...

He had an extraordinarily troubled life. He didn't learn to walk until he was seven years old. he learned to speak until he was 8 years old he had a physical disability he had a mental disability and it became increasingly rare throughout his life uh he had it when he was 14 years old the period was actually given to his aunt uh but he lived until he had 38 years old and almost certainly sterile. Several attempts were made to have him procreate with several different women and they never conceived, so he was probably sterile and possibly impotent too now for all these reasons, the people of Spain gave him a nickname which was um Carlos El heo, which means the bewitched one. or the bewitched one and now we think it was bewitched it was bewitched because of the really deep level of inbreeding that existed within this family so hsbs are known for their chin and lip that very distinctive facial feature that has been passed down through the Habsburg family, probably because of this incredible level of inbreeding and it's quite ugly, but it was actually considered a badge of honor in terms of it being the seal of divine rights the seal of royalty so here are some of the members of his family so that's Charles that's his uncle that's another of his ancestors and another and this gentleman here is his aunt actually um now when we see this this characteristic this Habsburg lip through these people and we think on how inbred this family was, let's take a look at their family tree, so for the geneticists among you, in fact, for anyone who knows what a family tree should look like, isn't it a family tree?
everything you know about genetics is wrong adam rutherford
Seven Generations. If you have two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, by the time you go back seven generations you should have about 250 people in your family tree, in fact most people have less than that because most people are relatively inbred as humans are. As a species, Charles had 29 in this family tree, so if we take an example, this is Mariana of Austria, who is his mother, and this is Philip IV of Spain, who is his father. Now María Ana of Spain is the mother of María Mariana of Austria and Felipe. IV's sister, so this woman here is his grandmother and his aunt at the same time, what that means is that this Margaret woman from Austria is his great-grandmother and his grandmother at exactly the same time, which means that this person, Charles, here is your great-great-grandfather, great-great-grandfather. grandfather and great-great-grandfather, all at the same time, basically, in a family tree you should never see loops like this and on and on and on and what we think this means genetically is that we actually know this because it's been calculated. um in 2011 by a Spanish group that analyzed their genome, their inbreeding coefficient is about 0.254, which means that more than a quarter of their genes are identical on both chromosomes, which means that there is a possibility of them arising recessive disorders because they did not have a dominant characteristic, a corrective on one chromosome, means that a quarter of all genomic material is subject to being homozygous on each Al, which is more than if a brother and sister successfully had a child , so basically you know that genetically I was a mess. and in fact, it all starts here with this woman who is Yanna de Castilla, now her nickname was loka, any Spanish speakers among you loka means the crazy one or the crazy one or the angry one who had, um uh, some serious mental health problems that we we have not had.
everything you know about genetics is wrong adam rutherford
I have been able to diagnose accurately posthumously, but in terms of the family tree at the level she was at, there should be 32 women in a generational line at that level now because there are a lot of intergenerational reproduction processes in this family tree. We don't actually have clear generational lines in this family tree, but in the two lines that she occupies there should be 32 and 64 women and she occupies 14 spaces that should be individual women, so the basic point of this is that in breeding It's really really bad for families, but really good for geneticists. Me and that's not really relevant.
That guy over there, but he's just there, that's my next king. Okay so when we talk about family trees we just go over some of the basics of biology that you all know very well this is the first really important family tree that was drawn 1837 Charles Darwin sketched it in one of his notebooks and where he was starting to think after his trip on the Beagle He was beginning to think about how characteristics were passed down from generation to generation and how that resulted in the diversity and radiation of species and 20 years later he would publish the most important book ever written.
So this is a family tree. This is an incredibly important family. uh tree, in terms of what it looks like now, actually in 2003, this is a very famous phylogenetic tree, uh, well, it shows the diversity of life on Earth in general, but it's actually changed since then, but it What this shows is around 2,000 individuals. The species that you can make up you realize that these are these little hairs on the edge of this circle, they are actually individual species, so all the bacteria and ARA are crowded here, which is not really representative of what the true, but you have pros, which are single cell carrots from the UK here, you have plants up here, animals there and a lot of fungi down here, the origin of life is there, where the first living cell we are referring to is Luca, the last spiced and split universal common ancestor. in two branches I archa and bacteria um and that happens there.
I have another talk about why the sentence I just said is completely

wrong

, but you'll have to come back another time for that and by the way, if you're interested in if you're a little bit anthropocentric, if you're interested in humans, just focus there and that's where we're right, so those ideas about the radiation of life on Earth, those the tree, the branching tree-like structure of how evolution by natural selection works, all of that was happening in the mid-19th century and, as all students of genetics and the history of science know, around the same time Gregor mentioned a monk of a monk. and scientist.
I really don't like calling him a monk. He may have been a monk, but he was a much better scientist than a monk. Actually, he was also a pretty good monk, so he was a good monk and a good scientist. but I'm just going to call it scientific. He was devising the rules of inheritance by growing his pea plants together. 29,000 pea plants bred together to produce melan rules, the rules of how traits are passed down from generation to generation. all the school kids have learned it and he was foreshadowing, of course, Darwin didn't know about this work, but it would all come together in the early 20th century, so, you know, the fruit fly is a model species. incredibly important for genetics and in the early 20th century in fly laboratories in New York, Morgan was discovering that individual characteristics were carried in individual fragments of DNA and chromosomes and that these explained characteristics such as having red eyes and white eyes in a fruit.
We fly and do these experiments in school and as college students where you take white-eyed flies and red-eyed flies and you rear them together and you get ratios of red and white flies and you never get pink flies and so on again. We begin to understand how units of inheritance are transmitted from generation to generation and how characters, how particular traits arise in organisms, fruit flies, humans and plants, as a result of those melan rules of inheritance, of course , in 1953, the double helix, the structure. The fact that DNA was the hereditary material was known before that, in the late 1930s, by the studies of Oswal Avery, among others, but it was Crick and Watson who discovered that the structure of DNA was the iconic double helix and they did it.
It was using some of the work of Ray Gosling Morris Wilkins and mainly Roslin Franklin, who generated this image. Ray Goling actually took the photo, but Roslin Franklin was the expert in It's called Photograph 51 with Nicole Kidman playing Rosalin Franklin. um I haven't seen it yet but it's had some really good reviews, how about that um uh cric and Watson acquired that data and more? Over the course of a few months in early 1953 it was discovered that the double helix is ​​the structure of DNA and that this allowed the mechanism for the transfer of information from generation to generation.
Now the structure of DNA is probably the most important scientific discovery. of the 20th century and it's because the structure of the double helix is ​​inherent to its function, it's not just that it's PR, it's not just that that's how it's packaged, but the fact that it has this double helix shape, this twisted ladder It is in this, it gives two specific things that DNA can do. The first is that it allows the replication of that molecule, perfect replication. If you take the stairs, I know you all know that, but I'm going to go over it anyway. you take the two branches of the stairs that are held together with struts by the nuclear bases um act and G, they pair in a particular way pairs with t c pairs with G and if you divide them you have all the A and T, C and G in one side, which means you know what's missing on the other side, so you can split this molecule in two and you have all the information on both strands, which allows you to replace the missing strands, so you have one molecule on first through the process of replication you have two molecules afterwards and that continues in every living cell and has been happening in every living cell for the last 4 billion years in an absolutely continuous way.
This is an animation of that process in action by Drew. Barry, who builds the best molecular animations and what you see here is the double helix being introduced into a small protein complex here where it separates into its two individual strands. There's one single strand there and the other single strand. there now when the single strands are coiled they are then fed to another protein complex where the missing strand is replaced so you get a double helix which splits into two and then replaced into two double helices, one double helix and then the second double helix there.
Well, this is the process by which replication occurs. This is the process that is happening in your cells right now. It has been occurring continuously in every cell that has ever existed in every organism that has existed for about 3.9 billion years, which is quite a while. Impressive, that's the first thing that DNA does and the second thing that DNA does is that it is effectively a code or contains a code because those letters, those nuclear bases inside the double helix form a language um and this was resolved in the years after 1953, until the '70s, that in fact the way the letters were arranged in a particular order encoded the basic units of proteins, which are amino acids and amino acids come together to form proteins and proteins, the whole life is made of or by proteins so they had worked in the late 1970s and this is the doctrine the central dogma is what is known as um that everyone knows that DNA is a code and through the molecule RNA intermediary producesproteins and all life is made of proteins or by proteins.
Francis Crick called this the central dogma. We don't really like the word dogma in science and in the 1970s he was asked why he called it central dogma and his answer was that he didn't really know what the word dogma meant, which was unfortunate, but it just shows that the Geniuses can be idiots anyway, so that's a brief history of genetics that takes us back to the 1980s, where we had really begun to seriously elucidate how biology works. how life works we had effectively established three grand unifying theories of biology that say the same thing now that I'm there are physicists here none at all that's good I can make this joke now physicists have been trying to come up with a grand unifying Theory of Everything for about 3000 years and how are you doing with that?
Not so well in biology we managed to do it. I have repeated it three times in the space of a hundred years and the first is Darwin's evolution by natural selection, in fact the first chronologically came a few years before and is called autotheory, it is a strangely uncontroversial cell theory and strangely it does not focus on it when taught, but I think in a slightly revisionist way, it should be cell theory states very clearly two things that are universally true, all life is made of cells and cells only come from existing cells with one exception, which is the origin of life okay so this is just a universal rule and it's good to have universal rules because it means that you can establish a framework from which you can ask your next questions so that's two what was cell theory of natural selection?
Oh yes, and the third, universal genetics, all living organisms. those cells since Luca for the last four billion years have used exactly the same system to code their proteins and reproduce, so you know, we had it in the late 1970s, we understood how all biology worked, except that returned The real reason we do genetics or the real reason genetics is funded is so that we can begin to understand how human characteristics are passed down from generation to generation and, in particular, how diseases manifest so that we could address those diseases, so what started happening in the 1980s, once we understood the genetic code, once we understood how DNA worked, once we understood how genetic inheritance worked, we started looking for genetic causes. of several diseases and one of the first.
Some were, so you know who Woody Guthrie was, the most famous folk singer, the most important folk singer of the 20th century, maybe Dylan, I don't know, well, he died of Huntington's disease and Huntington's disease is a disease. Incredibly penetrating, it is devastating. It is inevitably always fatal, but it is transmitted from generation to generation in a very clear Mendelian way, in exactly the same way that eye color and fruit flies are transmitted from generation to generation and in the same way that Mendle had established that the color of his peas. or the wrinkle of its peas or the shape of the leaves of its petals was passed from generation to generation the others that were beginning to be discovered on disk discovered in the late 80s were also due to muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis in 1986 887 and so we knew that we had really begun to understand the genetic cause, the underlying genetic cause, the genes that really give particular devastating diseases to people, from the late '80s to the '90s, individual laboratories around the world were working on specific diseases that tended to be like At that time people worked in genetics, they looked at a specific disease and tried to establish its underlying metabolic, physiological or genetic cause, so there was a kind of gold rush to try to establish genes that caused specific disorders and then in the mid-90s, um, thanks to people like John Solon and the welcome trust that funded much of the research to come, the Human Genome Project was created, probably the greatest scientific endeavor, yeah, certainly the biggest medical and life sciences effort maybe the large hron collider at CERN has now usurped it, but it's an incredibly collaborative, exciting, multidisciplinary, multilaboratory global project that basically said, look, you can have a lot of money to solve the entire human genome. every base pair, every gene in a human being, if they start working together, and this was a great story about how science progresses, it really fundamentally changed the way we do science because science became much more collaborative at this point. and some people argue that that's problematic and big efforts like this are not useful, but that's what happened, instead of looking at individual diseases, we look at the whole genome, we try to establish a database that we can fish through three billion of the human genome.
DNA letters to look for behaviors and traits and characteristics phenotypes 2001 nature published the first draft of the public Human Genome Consortium uh with great fanfare and it was a glorious day in February 2001 I was still doing my PhD at the time but a year later I was working in nature as an editor and it was a big fanfare and I don't know if any of you remember, but just before they published it, actually six months before they published it, Bill Clinton on stage with Craig Venter. who was the head of the private consortium standing next to it um oh I forgot his name the head of the public consortium whose name will come to me in a minute no it wasn't Watson it will come to me in a minute Watson retired in 1996 for interesting reasons Maybe we can talk about it later anyway he went on stage there was a big announcement Bill Clinton talked about the language of God, the language of life um, reports at the time suggested it would be a matter of months before We had established the cause of each disease genetics and we possibly cure many of them correctly.
That was said in 2000 in 2000 in July 2000. The publication was in February 2001. Actually, the greatest thing, the greatest revelation of the Human Genome Project was indeed that we didn't do it. I don't really understand how genetics works, two really interesting big scientific conclusions emerged and the first is exemplified in a nice little story that I love to tell, what is the number of genes that a human being has now that we like to think about. We are quite sophisticated organisms, I think that is not unreasonable at the time that we were thinking about genes that are related to individual characteristics or diseases like Huntington's or muscular dystrophy, so the question one of the big questions was: how many genes do we have? number of genes that will correspond to each characteristic we had.
A guy named Yan Bernie, one of the great European genomicists, director of the European Bioinformatics Institute, was a PhD student at Cold Spring Harbor with Jim Watson at the time. the last year of his PhD and anyone who has ever attended a scientific conference knows that the best place to be at a scientific conference is the bar, so after these I can't believe he resisted answering that everyone knows that. That's just a fact, after one of those bar meetings, you and Bernie, 21 or something, walked around with a betting book and he visited the world's top human geneticists and, for a dollar, He asked them how many genes a human being has.
This is the first page of that book which is the definition of what a gene is and basically you know what rules keep being added because geneticists can't even agree on what a gene is, but the basic premise was that for $1 dollar predicts how many genes a human has and six months later the answer would be revealed, the highest number was something like 600,000, right, and the lowest was 9,000, which was from a Frenchman and was a deliberate outlier. I know it's betting lower than everyone else just in case, but it was 29,000, the range. I think the average was 50 or 60,000 genes and the answer was: does anyone know 21,000?
So all the best geneticists on Earth had grossly overestimated. how many genes a human being has based on the assumption that a gene represents a characteristic and what this says is well, we don't really know why we are the way we are, based solely on our genetics, we have fewer genes than rice. daphnea or water flea this is a tapeworm we have fewer genes than a banana uh and in general terms we consider ourselves more sophisticated than bananas um so he told us well how complexity arises, how sophistication arises like that of a human being from fewer genes than the average bus has parts and the answer is that we didn't really know.
The second thing that emerged from the human genome projects was that almost none of your genome is made up of genes. About 97% of your genome is not genes, so all that. DNA, all those beautiful chromosomes that you see in those pictures, you know, those nice, beautiful genes. constitutes that fragment here pseudogenes, they are quite interesting, they are things that used to be genes, but have been, they are evolving out of function, um, huge chunks of massive repeats, fragments of DNA that were repeated thousands and thousands. many times with no apparent function, unique, non-coding, well, a lot of that is regulatory sequences, that is, sequences that turn genes on and off and things like that, and we know about those things, but also within that bunch of fragments of things I just have no idea what it was for, so the biggest scientific effort that had been attempted so far, the result was basically that we didn't understand genetics, we thought we had the rules, these great unifying theories, we thought we understood heredity, We thought we understood Mendelian genetics and we thought we understood, we understood the genetic code and in a sense we did, it's just that humans turned out to be a lot more complicated than anyone anticipated, now what that means is that when we talk about genetics in school in general, in families is not good, it means that we are fed and culturally we talk about inheritance in particular ways that do not really correspond to what we have discovered as geneticists.
Here are some trivial examples, so in school they taught me that eye color. was dominantly inherited, as was the ability to move the tongue correctly. I like to do that because only my only father in my family can't do it, so when we try to bother him we just do like this, now it works out. There is a genetic component to being able to move your tongue, but you can also learn it, so if you can't do it and you're really bored, then maybe you can learn to move your tongue yourself, it's a bit trivial and a big waste of time.
Eye color is the classic example: you have a gene that codes for brown eyes and blue eyes and brown eyes are dominant over blue eyes, right, all children, all schoolchildren know this, except that there is another gene which is for green eyes and penetrance, the quantity, the meaning of that gene that has in the phenotype, the relationship between the genotype, which is the DNA, and the phenotype, which is what it seems, is more complex than we think. teach and it's effectively impossible to predict your children's eye color based on your eye color, in fact what we have is a full spectrum of eye colors from incredibly pale, you know, kind of pastel blue which is common in Scandinavia to almost black, where you can We really don't distinguish between the pupil and the iris and brown eyes.
Brown eyes are also common in Norway, more common than in Sweden, so we have four particular traits that we once thought had this direct Mendelian pattern of inheritance. but it turns out it was a little more complex than we originally thought, there are many genes that have specific characteristics associated with them, and here are a couple of examples, there is a form of polia, a very rare form of polia, sometimes we have six fingers. when I upload that slide it takes a couple of seconds for people to realize what's

wrong

with it, that's not cool by the way, and here's the example I like to give the most, does anyone know what that is?
This morning's talk is ear wax. There is a gene that decides whether you have one of the two types of ear wax, either wet or dry. Secca is very common in East Asians. Humidity is common in Western and European populations, but you know, this is not exactly the dream of genetic engineering and baby design that we once thought of. You can predict the type of earwax your child will have based on the type of earwax you have. There you go, genetics, so what really happened then is that A geneticist started inventing new ways of scanning genomes to look for how traits were passed down.from generation to generation and how they affect how they are expressed in populations, and one of the ways we did that was by looking at what are known as genome-wide association studies.
What you do is you take a population of people who have a shared characteristic, a disease or a trait or something, you scan their entire genome and look for parts that are similar, right? and then you infer that the parts that identify themselves as similar in one group of people and not in another group can have a role in the phenotype that we are talking about now if we are talking about something like earwax or cystic fibrosis or something that has a strong monogenic characteristic. get a results graph that looks like this, so these are the numbered chromosomes at the bottom, each of these points is an individual person and what we see is our massive peak here which says that on chromosome 6 there is something which corresponds very closely, which with whatever we're looking at, but these types of images, it's called a Manhattan plot because, you know, it looks a little bit like the Manhattan skyline, these types of images are relatively rare compared to the complex disorders that are interesting, things like heart disease or neurological functions or um uh mental health issues related to genetic schizophrenia things like that, you actually get plots that are, you know, just a self, I mean, an incredible mess, an impenetrable mess, uh, we see hundreds of different little things.variants, so things that are a little bit more significant than the average and cumulatively associated with a particular disease or a particular complex trait, cool and that's what the picture looks like genetics, which I think we will see more and more. that human variation is going to be explained by the accumulation of multiple, many small variations among us, instead of saying there is one gene for this, what we are saying is that there are dozens of genes that could be, because this science is always more complex than we think.
I initially anticipated anyway now I'm a brief history of genetics and I'm a science communicator now I don't do much research anymore um and now I'm interested in how we talk about genetics culturally, how we report it now, all scientists believe that their field is the one that It is more distorted by the media, everyone believes it. I'm telling you it's genetics, because I'm a geneticist and a journalist, so I'm really glad you dispute that statement, but you're wrong. So when we look at complex traits, when we look at how, look at how they are talked about in the media when, relative to genetics, no more complex traits are known. that intelligence and we have known for a hundred years that there is a high degree of heritability of intelligence, however you measure it, there are a lot of problems with looking at metrics like IQ, but however you measure intelligence, it is highly heritable, um, and that's why headlines like this arise when these ideas enter public discourse as all science should and particularly when they enter political discourse.
I mean, this headline betrays that no, this is not exactly what this guy who was this guy's educational consultant, Michael, did. who was the education secretary when this was written in 2013, but there was great fury. I don't know if it crossed the North Sea to you, but um, the possibility that there was a significant genetic role in something as complex and mysterious as intelligence and that that could have some impact on educational policy uh was controversial to say the least. now this is an example of the interplay between how we understand genetics or I guess how we don't understand genetics how we are trying to understand genetics and how it relates to public policy and how we talk about these incredibly important issues so what I did was to compile some of my favorite headlines.
This is a guy named HL Menin who was the editor. of the Baltimore Sun for many years, but decades, and he was known as the Baltimore Sage, he was very good at uttering outlandish aphorisms and this is my favorite, this one, this one is this one, aptly describes the relationship between genetics and the media For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong, so here is a fun game for you. If you do genetics, you go to Google and you type scientific, discover the 4 x gene and you get thousands of answers from all the media, from the trivial to the very serious um from the BBC where I work, the guardian, where I work for the tabloids of the sun, it is everywhere and this is part of my argument that for a hundred years we have been talking about specific characteristics in genetics, genes for things and the answer is that we now know that there are practically no genes for anything, so when They get reports like that, people like me say, oh God, so I want this to be known as Rutherford's law for no reason other than vanity.
I want to have a legacy, so if you could promote the idea that this is Rutherford's law, then do it, but here is a collection of some of my favorites that I selected, so Guardian I write for The Guardian frequently scientists discover that the gene for cocaine addiction does not exist Gene for cocaine addiction, so scientists did not discover it. I mean, that's the general rule with this type of game. What happens is that scientists discover that one gene has a slightly greater association with people who have particular addictive personalities, um, and who may be prone to using cocaine.
There is no gene for cocaine addiction. This is from the common man. which is certainly not the greatest source of scientific accuracy known um scientists discover a transsexual gene there is a gene for being transsexual it's hard to imagine in a Darwinian sense how that would work, here's another one from the men's journal. The gene that can really scare you is one of the genes that makes you lean left, one gene that makes you politically liberal, and a third, a love cheater. Generate a gene that makes you prone to adulterous affairs. The funny thing about those last three is that they are actually all the same gene and were reported within a few weeks of each other.
Can you imagine having that particular phenotype where you are perpetually terrified, liberal and unfaithful. Scientists discover Hygeniene. This is a useful example from the B BBC. Now I admit that the copy of this article and the text below is more nuanced and explains some of the things I'm getting at. say, but headlines really matter. I think this is a good example because height is a single measurement so we know I'm 5' 11 with my shoes on so it's a single number and so the idea is the culturally transposed idea that There will be a gene that corresponds to that one measurement, it's ingrained, it's culturally ingrained in us, but if you think about it for more than six seconds, it's pretty obvious that height is made up of many different components and behavioral traits that include the body. relative.
The dimensions sizes are correct, obviously, clearly, how you were raised, yeah, the environmental stresses on you in the womb, the environmental stresses, um, and the availability of food as you develop exercise, all kinds of things from behavior will influence your actual height. In fact, height is incredibly heritable, the best predictor of your children's height is simply the average between the two parents. We know that a component of height is genetically determined, but it is only a small proportion that we can explain, simply by thinking. about this because you don't know it for a long time in an uncomplicated way without having to go to research papers of which there are many on the genetics of height you can just see well, you know, when you see that you clearly think well, that doesn't It's right and it can't be right.
Only God knows what is happening there. um, you know. I don't think genetics has much to say about whether you're going to get hit by a bus or eaten by a shark, but apparently, as this article presents a pretty interesting case study, a gene called monoamine oxidase has been widely reported on and um uh um maoa, as it is known in a very small study, what I consider to be of low power, in a particular version of this gene. associated with high risk behavior in the city um workers um hedge fund managers those types of people and um people with gambling addictions right, it was also associated and a different version was found to be associated with um maues new indigenous New Zealanders and by that earned him a nickname in the press that really sticks which is the warrior Gene right Warrior like in Wars I said this once in a talk and people thought I said worrior as in you worry about things but it's not like it comes back to you bellicose according to the press, that's all well and good, those studies were problematic in their own way and for the genetic geneticist to look at, but it becomes a really non-significant problem in 2009 2010, this is a guy named Bradley Waldrop and in a year .
Bradley Wardrop early at his home in Tennessee after a day of heavy drinking and Bible reading, waited for his wife and her friend to return home, at which point he shot his wife, hacking her to death and wounding her deeply with a blunt instrument to the friend. Now there was blood everywhere, it was premeditated, we know that he left a message for his children saying: "Say goodbye to your mother." About reading the Bible. I didn't just mention that to delve deeper into Christianity. He wrote this in his Bible. message, so it was premeditated that he had decided to kill these two women, one of them, and seriously injure the other, so he was as guilty as hell and, um, he was charged with premeditated murder and he was sentenced to death and A year later, his lawyers had a genetic test done for monoamine oxidase, the warrior Gene um successfully argued that he had a particular genetic version, he had a particular version of this gene that predisposed him to commit violent crimes and, as a result of that, His sentence was changed from death to life imprisonment.
I'm not a death penalty advocate at all, but whatever your opinion on corporal punishment, sorry, capital punishment. This is a decision that is based on a poor understanding of how genetics works properly. This was a comment from one of the jury members. The diagnosis is a diagnosis. A bad gene is a bad gene. There is no bad gene. The punchline to this story is that a third of white men have the exact same variant that Bradley Wardrop has in this particular gene, so you already know. room I don't know there are 200 people here probably half of you are men most of you look whitish so a third of you have the same genetic makeup as this guy who is a convicted murderer so we have reached this stage so strange stage, I mean, this is a relatively rare example, but it's important, it's important because there's a flawed understanding of how genetics works that is based on a whole history of being culturally programmed to not understand how genetics works back in the 20th century.
XIX, we had a phenomenon. called phenology where the shape of people's skulls was measured because it was stated and assumed that the shape of people's skulls would determine behaviors, including criminal behaviors. We now know that that is simply not true. Another unfortunate example, the Sandy Hook murders. Adam Lanza a couple of years ago, which was horrible, you know, a very common tragedy in America and of course you know about the mass murders, also one of the first things that happened after Adam Lanza would commit suicide and after this developed, the local hospital stated that they would take his genome and sequence it to try to understand genetically what predisposed him to this terrible evil act.
Could they find a gene for evil? is what some journalists said. I was reporting it there is no gene for evil there is no gene for mass murder there is nothing in Adam Lanza's DNA that reveals anything that could explain his crimes and that is important it is important to know that we have been doing this for many years old uh these two guys are John Wayne gasey um and Peter ciron, known as the vampire of dorf, they are both serial killers Peter um John Wayne gasy killed 33 teenagers um murdered ciron was convicted of killing nine, but it is believed that There could have been up to 60 when they were executed they took their skulls and brains to analyze them and see if they were different from normal people and of course the answer was no.
Human behavior is incredibly complex and incredibly difficult to unravel and it is an interaction between your genetics and the environment in a way that is almost inscrutable, not inscrutable because we can understand these things, but they will never be answers to these complex complex behavioral traits, which means there is a gene for this. They are not your genes and genes are not your destiny Now that was all very serious, so I want to end on a slightly lighter note, which is another way we misunderstand genetics in a non-trivial but annoying way more than any. another thing. this was a this was a headline this is a story that went around the world last year,so it's worth looking at this as a case study in science communication because that headline, as far as I can determine, there is not a single sentiment in that headline that is accurate or justifiable and yet this was pretty standard, so I'm obviously not a climate change scientist, but I spoke briefly to some climate change scientists to establish the accuracy of this headline. and this story so the first oops sorry the first thing is that gingers might go extinct well Ginger is um it's caused by a mutation in a gene called mc1r and it's relatively rare it's more common in Scandinavian and Scottish populations and no I don't really know why, there are a number of suggestions as to why its frequency, because it is recessive, has remained in northern populations, but we don't really know why, as it is a recessive disorder, sorry, let me Please let me edit. that's a recessive trait, I mean, it's not a disorder, I mean, it's such a beautiful thing, um, I mean, honestly, I don't know why that fell out of my mouth, um, there's one, um, because it's recessive, truth, recessive characteristics. they remain within populations unexpressed, so the only way Ginger Hair could become extinct is if all people with Ginger Hair, as homozygous as both carriers, or all people who are carriers of a Ginger genotype, uh, They never had sexual relations. again and I just don't see that happening.
I don't see that happening to the extent that when I wrote a review of this article in The Guardian I volunteered to have sex with redheads if there was a threat that they would actually do it. extinct I told my wife before I posted this and I think she gave me the green light um I mean the other the other thing is that there is no evidence that climate change is going to make Scotland sunnier and less cloudy and There is no evidence that ginger hair is an adaptation to cloudy conditions or any type of weather condition, so I'm afraid you don't know that this is a science communication exercise and there are no marks for everyone who posted this story Worldwide. as a case study it's interesting because it says it was actually a press release from a company that sells genetic genealogy testing kits for around £150 and the G the Jee the ginger Jean um testing kit was an add-on to, I think , 25 years. to this, to this service, but only because of some sneaky PR and good press relations and a story that is exciting to read but is simply not true, the story becomes part of our culture again and there we are.
I prefer to talk about what science is. can tell us instead of making jokes about why what can't and recently a different company analyzed my personal genome and guess what I have the redhead Jean and I'm proud to have a little patch here in my beard. which actually says something pretty interesting because I spent my entire life, I spent 40 years not thinking I was Ginger until I started growing, you know, growing a beard a little bit and being a little bit, you know, seeing Ginger's hairs. and think well, how do you know? How is that? And that also shows something about genetics, which is that even if you have a recessive gene for a particular trait that we know how it works, it still manages to do weird things and express itself in one area of ​​my face. than in my head or in my body and this shows again that we really don't know why that would happen.
We are really very complicated people. This is also a good thing. This is one of my favorite pieces of data visualization. I'm getting to the end, and it relates to how we think about how genes are passed from generation to generation and we used to talk about bloodlines and say that things were in the blood and now we know that blood does not carry hereditary information. and that genes are, but we are very interested in our own families and we are very interested in our own genealogies. It turns out that you are directly descended from people that you don't carry any DNA from and you can see this is in this beautiful diet, so if you imagine that this black semicircle here is you and that the blue ones are maternal and the yellow ones are paternal, then this is your mother and this is your father and you have 50% of your DNA inherited from your mother and 50% from your father now of course they have grandparents 1 2 3 4 and you got 50% from their mothers and fathers and so on and so on and so on and so on grandparents parents grandparents great-grandparents great-great-grandparents now by the time you get to this generation, which is the fifth, you start to see dark spots here and what they are are people that you are descended from and that you don't carry DNA from, so What your direct ancestors are, you are their lineage and you have no genetic relationship.
For them, when you get to 11 generations ago, more than half of your direct ancestors had DNA that you don't have, which is just, you know, that's what I find that kind of fascinating, um and strange, it also completely has sense because of the way we understand how genes are passed from parents to children, but also because when we look at family trees there are not enough people on Earth for this relationship to continue going back in time if you have two parents and four grandparents and eight great-grandparents and so on by the time you get to the 11th century there should be something like 1.3 billion people on Earth and of course that's not true, we estimate the number of people depends on how you measure it. that have ever existed is about 107 billion, so every time you go back a generation, the number of ancestors you have doubles, except it doesn't.
There comes a point where your family trees start to fold in on themselves and they're no longer a tree but a web or a network and that's how we should think about family trees and inheritance when we look at this kind of deep genealogy, you know? when do you have the program? Who do you think you are here? It's a very popular show in the UK and the US where people trace their ancestry and check records to see if they were related to someone famous and they love to find out that they are related to someone famous like they know the Duke of some place or some criminal and then they say wow, this is what explains why I am like this or that explains why I really want to live in a huge house or things like that if you go back to the 10th century in Europe according to the statistics that are correct.
We think you need a second to understand what I'm about to say. Everyone who lived in the 10th century in Europe and who left ancestors who are alive today are the ancestors of everyone living in Europe today. Well, if you were alive. in the 10th century and you have ancestors alive today, they are your ancestors, the pool that our genes in Europe come from is incredibly small, what that means is that all of you, maybe not, maybe not, are descended directly from Charlamagne. I mean, I can say. This is a fact, this is a fact, you have royal lineage, every single one of you, so everyone is special, which means no one is special, so the next time you see someone saying well, turns out we made my family tree or we did. my genetics and I'm a descendant of 11th century French royalty, you can say well, me too, because everyone on Earth is about a 30th cousin.
Sometimes you get the equivalent if you go further east and say everyone is descended from Genis Khan also. It is completely true that you are descended from Gas Khan and so are you. I can't tell, so you just have to go back another 3,000 years and you have a population from which everyone on Earth is descended and that includes people in the farthest reaches of darkest Africa. In the far reaches of southern Asia, everyone descended from the same group of people only about 3,000 years ago. We are incredibly inbred. This is my genome. This is actually the analysis I was talking about before, which is a nice piece of data visualization.
Also, it's an interesting thing to watch, not only because it's interesting, but also because it tells us something that genetics doesn't tell us about and, you know, it's attractive for people to do this. It costs about I don't know 200. quid or something like that and you get some data like this, which is funny now, my mother is Indian and my father is from the North East of England and that shows up almost perfectly in my genetic makeup. I have a perfect 50/50 ad. mixing of two separate populations, which is incredibly predictable based on where I come from and a little boring, but good to know.
From this graph you know that 50% of my DNA comes from the subcontinent and 50% comes from Northern Europe, generally speaking, Northern Europe even says broadly. Northern Europe is a good bit of scandal, look at that, yes, hello, brothers. It is important to also recognize what this means. This is something that isn't often talked about when we talk about genetic genealogy, which is that this doesn't show where I come from. It shows no historical roots. It doesn't show that I'm part Viking. It does not show that I am partly descended from the Mongols. What it shows are the areas on Earth where my DNA fragments are most frequently found today.
It doesn't say I'm descended from Vikings, probably well, I'm descended from Vikings as we all are and not only not only wouldn't I, I would say this to an audience that's not in the heart of Viking Land um, but it's just a fact of life. The way populations work, the way humans work, is a phrase I'm using in my book and in the articles I write about this at the moment, the problem with genetics is that there are two humans. hot and moving stuff, so for the last million years we've been moving and having as much sex as possible and that's reflected in graphs like this.
I mean, this one is pretty boring because it's so simple that there's one interesting thing worth mentioning in this. which is this small portion there that is Native American, it's a very, very small proportion, but I looked at that and I thought, well, that's interesting, you know how to explain that, and again, it's a good story to explain something about the shape. Genetics works, what it is, in fact, is my mitochondrial DNA, so we have our complete genome, which is made up of chromosomes, but we also have a separate part of DNA, which is a small loop that exists in our cells and that it is only inherited along the way.
The maternal line is a very small proportion of the total amount of DNA, but it is quite useful. My mitochondrial DNA is quite old, so it originated in India about 60,000 years ago. That date precedes the date when people began migrating up and across the Beringia Strait. people and they came through what is now Alaska and they came down and populated the Americas, so it doesn't show that I have Native American DNA, it doesn't show that I'm, you know, related to Sissing Bull or someone like that, what? what it shows is that the common origins of Native Americans are shared a long time ago with the people I'm descended from, so be careful with these, they're kind of interesting, they're kind of trivially interesting, I mean there's a lot of facts attached to them. into that and I'm not sure I'll tell you anything more than trivial and interesting things, um, so be careful now, it better end well, yeah, they'll give me a thumbs up to finish.
I just want to finish by saying one thing. Lastly, I have been quite critical of this field of genetics. I've been quite critical of the way it's reported, which is very much my responsibility and I've fought quite a bit over the last 10 years to try to get better genetics talked about in public, that's my mission in life um , there is a field that has been completely revolutionized by our understanding of genetics and that is paleoanthropology, so the understanding of human origins um and this is just this wonderful example of who we are in 2015 five years ago um They found a bone and later a tooth in a cave in southern Siberia, near the border between China and Mongolia, in a place in the Alti Mountains called Denisova, and this cave has been a rich source of archaeological remains for decades. 50,000 AR.
I've been pulled out of it over a period of time that I think is 100,000 years, but this bone came out, which is the distal tip of a finger from a juvenile female. Now you can't categorize what type of juvenile female it came from based on one. single finger bone we know it's a hominid but that's a group that includes all humans uh monkeys not monkeys sorry um gorillas chimpanzees and orangutans that's not enough information to say what species it is, but in 2010 a group with headquarters in Germany managed to extract its complete genome from this single bone and what we found is that it was a completely different human species that lived up to 30,000 years ago, probably cohabited with Neanderthals, probably cohabited with anatomically modern humans, people like us, but a species that we did not have.
The idea existed because his archaeological remains did not exist, but by looking at his DNA and comparing it with the DNA of other humans, we knew that it was neither us nor us and, therefore, something different from what happened 30,000 years ago, the week past, a famous find. in a place called atap and the south of Spain that we knowfor years it was revised based on the extraction of DNA from the bones there and places the origin of the Neand tals hundreds of thousands of years earlier than we thought, it also shows a mixture, so this was the great Revelation, it shows that Neander Tal crossed paths with humans.
I carry 2.7% of my genome is of Neander ancestry. Sorry to bother you again, but you probably don't have Neal DNA in you, but you. You probably have DNA from this Dennis ens because that's the distribution of how these genes flow through the earth. Now we've talked for a century about Neals not being the same species as us, they have a different species name: homon ne and homon ne and Enis um. and now we know many other human species that we did not know before. I now believe that the entire species concept is flawed and erroneous and desperately needs to be revised because if I carry DNA from a Neitel that means the Neals were my ancestors, so my ancestors, like yours, successfully had sex with another species. and they produced offspring that would last for tens and hundreds of thousands of years and which according to classical species concepts is impossible, so ne anels can't be a species separate from us or the whole species concept is just wrong, so that this is a field that is changing right now because of how we understand genetics and it's very exciting and quite controversial and that's what my new book is about. but it won't come out for a year and I'll come back in a year and you can buy it, so that's it for me.
Thank you so much. You have time for questions. Yes. Questions. Any question you must have a question. Really. It doesn't matter, you have a front row here, you have something to say about being immortal, I have something to say about being immortal, the question was: what is happening? What was the question? Do you have to say? Do you have something? what to say? be immortal at all Immortal well, in a sense we are immortal, right, all species are immortal because our genes are passed from generation to generation by having children, you become immortal, um, you know, you know, Richard Dawkins is a famous book The selfish gene in which he describes how the gene is the unit of selection.
He wanted to call that book The Immortal Gene um but it was decided that The Selfish Gene was a better title. I wish it was the immortal gene because do you know that's what genetics is like? It is our quest for immortality. It just doesn't happen. The shortfall is that immortality never happens during our lifetimes. That's a joke. Yeah, so obviously it can't be covered.

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and you so you didn't touch on epigenetics um but you think that's the reason for your ginger patch on your cheek or I'm um I have a little internal bet with myself that if I give a talk on genetics someone will ask me about epigenetics and Thank you because I just won that bet.
I am extremely skeptical about how epigenetics is talked about. It is a topic that we have known about for many years. It used to be just called gene regulation and it is, what if it's not. I know that epigenetics is a particular way of how we turn genes on and off and how genes interact with the environment. There's a particular mechanism in which DNA fragments, um, oop. Something strange happened there, the DNA fragments. Well, I forgot about that. of the DNA are marked in a particular way with a very small molecule and that has the effect of silencing the gene, it has the effect of turning off that gene and we know that it has a very non-significant effect on the way we interact with it. the environment has become incredibly fashionable in recent years in the press but also in science and science is prone to fads um and I think the level of because it's fashionable the level of scrutiny applied to some of the studies. that are emerging about epigenetics might not be as high as we would expect.
Much of the talk about epigenetics is that it is transgenerational, that it is passed not only from mother to child or father to child, but also to grandchildren, and in theory it is sometimes argued that that makes it non-Darwinian, makes it more of a kind of quasi-Lamaran right that you can acquire characteristics during your lifetime or that your parents can pass on characteristics that they have been exposed to from generation to generation. I don't think there is any evidence to suggest that. That is true, we have seen that transgenerational epigenetics lasts three or four generations in mammals, and now the unit of selection is the gene, the gene has to be permanently transformed to be selectable, so epigenetics is not selective in a medium, so I don't think we have evidence that transgenerational epigenetics is non-Darwinian at this point.
I also don't see any evidence that it's permanent, so transgenerational is permanent and the third thing is, um, I can't remember what. The third thing is that there are some pretty interesting human studies that are great stories, but a little incomplete. One of them was called Vinter of Hunger, so towards the end I have time for this, yes, towards the end of October. In 1944, apparently out of spite more than anything else, the Nazis withdrew from Holland and decided to blockade a region and prevent food from entering as they retreated, as the war began to end. The Third Reich was being crushed, so they blockaded this region of Holland and famine ensued, until the Allies arrived at Easter 1945 in what was called an operation where they simply brought food, but during a period of approximately six months for that population.
In West Holland it was now subject to deep famine because it was in the modern era and because it was in a scientifically literate country. These people have been studied intensively then and continue to be studied now regarding the effects that severe malnutrition has on human physiology. I mean, basically, it was an experiment, a fairly well-designed experiment that we were never able to do, but that was effectively carried out by the atrocious cruelty of the Nazis. Many women became pregnant and became pregnant during that six-month period and we have studied those children. who were now over 70 years old and we studied their children because they now have children, now, as expected, their children suffered very high levels of a number of disorders, including psychiatric mental health disorders, but also complex things like obesity , you know, cardiovascular problems, etc. and this is not so surprising, what is surprising is that it seemed to be passed on to the next generation as well and that their children had a higher frequency of various disorders, now that is fascinating and demands more study and understanding.
It is not a clear example of transgenerational epics, genetics, the transmission of acquired traits from generation to generation, is very interesting, but it is one of those cases in which it must be looked at very carefully. I don't know if you saw there was a headline about Three weeks ago, in August, that Holocaust survivors had passed on the stress and trauma to their children and grandchildren. Did anyone see that yes, it was? I don't think the study was very good and I don't think it's necessarily true for complex reasons, but I think it's again an example of how history is a little better than the mundanity of real science, it screams, it speaks very well, the story is actually debunking it or wait, wait, wait for the microphone because this is interesting, no.
POS is described as an example of epigenetic inheritance and the promise that epigenetics in its transgenerational inheritance gives to medicine and

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, but, as you say, the evidence is very bad and it is not conclusive, well, I have not seen that Yeah. It sounds to me like something that's probably not correct, which is unfortunate because we try to tell stories that are correct and that are also good stories. There is another cross-generational study that is based on CarX and Sweden. I may have mispronounced that, which is something similar where, due to fluctuations in crop availability, and I won't be able to remember the details right now, but it was something like children, children exposed to hunger one year and rich years the next. next year there was a different difference, something different in them that had to do with weight compared to those who didn't have that pattern and it was also different and reversed in boys and girls, so again one of those things that you look at and well, if that's real, that's the first question you should ask when you make those observations, if it's real, then that's extraordinary and very interesting, but you know, the phrase that we sometimes use in the skeptical world is that claims Extraordinary requires extraordinary. evidence and for any of these studies I don't think we still have extraordinary evidence, even if they are true, it doesn't mean they are not Darwinian, if they were true and we could show a permanent change that had been acquired as a result As a result of epigenetics, it would still constitute only a minimal proportion of the amount of genetic information we have that is transferred from generation to generation in a way that we have understood for 50 years, so you know, I am skeptical about the importance of epigenetics compared to the processes that we already understand that's not to say that epigenetics isn't important, it is, but I think be careful with exceptional claims, thanks everyone for coming and thanks Adam for a great talk, so we're moving forward. again we have a scientific communication course um but we all welcome you on Thursday for a talk um information designer angre Angela Morelli she will give a talk on how to use information design in research it is said 2 o00 thank you very much

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