#382 - The Eye of Nature

#382 - The Eye of Nature

Bibliography

• Author: Making Sense with Sam Harris - Subscriber Content
• Full_Title: #382 - The Eye of Nature
• Category: podcasts
• URL: https://share.snipd.com/episode/5a060461-f7c3-4fc9-af64-889c7bc417e7
• Last Highlighted Date: 2024-09-13 03:01:42.897224+00:00

Highlights

• Unlocking the Genetic Book of Life Summary: A future zoologist, envisioned as Soph, may master the art of reading animal genomes to unravel complete ancestral histories, an ability currently unattainable. Presently, predicting an animal’s phenotype from its genotype remains a significant challenge, emphasizing that much of the exploration focuses on understanding phenotypes to glean insights into ancestral stories. The distinction between genotype and phenotype is crucial; while genotype refers to the genetic makeup, phenotype encompasses the observable traits and behaviors stemming from that genetic foundation. Transcript: Speaker 1 Okay, I have a sort of recurrent fantasy about a zoologist of the future, scientist of the future. I make her female and I call her Soph, scientist of the future. And I believe that scientist of the future will be able to read the book which is the animal and its genes, and piece together the entire palimpsest of its ancestral history. It’s something we can’t do at the moment. And the part of the book is, parts of the book are about the little preliminary, fumbling steps, nursery slopes steps, which we can make towards that end. Speaker 2 Given an unspecified genome, how close are we to being able to predict the phenotype of the animal? Speaker 1 Not very close. And that, of course, would be a big problem for the genetic book of the dead. And much of the book actually is not about genes at all. It’s about using the phenotype of an animal to reconstruct the book, which is its set of ancestral histories. Soff in the future will be able to do it with the genes. And we can’t really do that now. There is no decoding process whereby you can get a genotype and say what the ancestral worlds of this animal were. Speaker 2 I think, Richard, we should probably remind people of just… We should define our terms here. What’s the difference between a genotype and a phenotype? Speaker 1 Well, a genotype is the set of genes in the animal, and the phenotype is what the genes manifest themselves as. So the phenotype is the body, its behavior, everything that we actually see of the animal.
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