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There's no such thing as a "gene for a trait". Just because some gene perfectly correlates with some trait doesn't mean that's all the gene does. There will be
by quantadev 2y ago
There's no such thing as a "gene for a trait". Just because some gene perfectly correlates with some trait doesn't mean that's all the gene does. There will be 1000s of things that gene does, and merely one of them just happens to be hair color.
- superb_dev 2y agoThis is covered at the end the article: > No one previously knew Arhgap36 could affect skin or hair coloration—it is involved in many aspects of embryonic development, and major mutations that affect its function throughout the body would probably kill the animal, Barsh says. But because the deletion mutation appears to only affect Arhgap36 function in melanocytes, cats with the mutation are not only healthy, but also cute.
- ourmandave 2y agoit is involved in many aspects of embryonic development Ugh, you don't find this out by not looking at a lot of cute orange (and non-orange) cat embryos under a microscope. =(
- FollowingTheDao 2y agoThat is just them making sht up. Arhgap36 does not just effect the MC1R receptor. It is GTPase activator for the Rho-type GTPases. And there are a lot of them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_family_of_GTPases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rho_family_of_GTPases These polymorphisms not diminish GTP totally, it just lowers it.
- quantadev 2y agoIt's more clear to just say "There's no such thing as a gene for a trait", especially since the title of the article says the opposite, and is wrong. That's why I corrected it.
- benatkin 2y agoYou’re arguing semantics. It doesn’t make it more clear. The gene has been shown to have a causation or at least an interesting correlation in orange cat probability. That’s enough for it to say behind which is not very specific, likely chosen deliberately for that property.
- quantadev 2y agoWhat was wrong was the singular form of the word "gene". That means "The Gene", and that's wrong. Richard Dawkins talks about this in his Selfish Gene book. People often say "the gene for this" or "the gene for that" and it's not how things work. But the word "behind" also does imply causation rather than correlation, which is also wrong.
- polishdude20 2y agoSo is it more like there's some secondary "thing" that is for hair color and it looks at that gene to determine the color but there can also be another secondary "thing" such as hair length that also uses that same gene to determine that?
- quantadev 2y agoA rough analogy is like if you flipped some bits in a computer program's executable code and then looked at what happens when you run that code, and notice a specific feature now no longer works for example. Yeah you found a way to break something, but you don't know what else you broke, or what the full effects were of flipping those bits.
- astrange 2y agoAlso, the results with the current methods could be fine for imprecise purposes. Say, if you had some cat embryos and wanted to know which one was orange for your designer kitten. But in the future it might not be good enough for later more precise interventions; if you just start editing cats to make them orange now you're going to find out what the side effects are.
- willis936 2y agoI think with modern computer systems the effects would be relatively silo'd. I have the sense that each gene are more multi-use and interconnected than execution memory.
- quantadev 2y agoThe more complex a system is the more reuse of code there generally is. (i.e. multiple different functions making use of some shared function) That means if you randomly alter something, it's more likely to have multiple effects rather than a single effect. BTW, most times in software parlance "silo'd" means "not interconnected" rather than "interconnected".
- 2y ago
- m00x 2y agoOr it could do nothing, it could do a single thing, or it can do several things. Sometimes it just influences color, but often not. They already addressed it in the article, so I'm not sure what the purpose of this comment is.
- Sharlin 2y agoTrying to sound smart by nitpicking on article titles without actually reading the article is more or less the national sport of Hacker News.
- quantadev 2y agoActually 'nitpicking' is when you assume someone didn't read an article whenever their post references the title of the article. Clarifying something in an article in a more clear way than the article did is fine, and especially when even the actual title itself is misleading as well.
- latexr 2y ago> Clarifying something in an article in a more clear way than the article did is fine, and especially when even the actual title itself is misleading as well. That is very true. However, to myself (and presumably the other commenters) it didn’t look like that’s what you were doing. Though I’ll certainly give you the benefit of the doubt and trust that was your intention. In the future, it might help if you also quote the specific part of the article that does the clarification, so it’s clear you’re aware of it and are providing additional context or better wording.
- astrange 2y agoGenetics solve causation issues by putting "correlation does not equal causation" at the start of their paper and then writing the rest of it as if it did equal causation. I don't fault them much, it's kind of hard to do an experiment here, but don't believe their results too hard.
- smackeyacky 2y agoThe fun thing is that they drift. So you might breed orange cats by selecting cats that are orange but over time the correlation to the genome might become weaker. It happens quite a bit in livestock genetics.
- quantadev 2y agoYeah, not even DNA is fully in control. Michael Levin's planarian worms experiments show that he can use an electromagnetic field for a short time in a certain way, and create a two-headed worm (normally it's one of course) that will persist to all it's offspring even though there's been ZERO alterations to DNA. So there is still much about the emergent complexity that we do not know.
- asdff 2y agoEven weirder conceptually than that: you have the same dna in all your cells. So why is your brain your brain, your eyes your eyes, and so on? Then you learn that not all genes are expressed all the time. Then you learn even among those expressed genes that they could have been spliced differently and resulted in completely different protein structures. No magnets needed for this example of phenotypes extending beyond mere dna sequence, just a mirror to look at yourself.
- quantadev 2y agoThat was correct and made sense until the magnets and mirrors stuff which would require a bit of mental telepathy to understand what you meant.
- 2y ago
- amelius 2y agoYes. For example, in humans, being red haired correlates with fear of dentists. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2740987/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2740987/
- EasyMark 2y agoCould that also be that dentists are meaner to red haired people too? Subconsciously of course.
- AceyMan 2y agoCould it be because red hair people require additional anesthesia for equivalent effect, which perhaps they don't get at their dentist, resulting in more pain: Ergo, they're scared of visiting their dentist.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]