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.
> 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.
It'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.
You’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.
What 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.
Actually '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.
> 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.
Like I said, I understand and believe you. But clearly that’s not what most commenters understood so I proposed how you could’ve made that clearer and not have to keep clarifying and getting downvoted.
It was simply a suggestion. You can take it or leave it, it’s all the same to me.
Holy moly, you’re one unreasonably angry individual. You do realise you’re lashing out at someone who said repeatedly they believed you and was polite about it, right?
I’d suggest perhaps closing Hacker News for the day but I get the feeling you’ll find some way to be insulted at that as well, so instead I’ll just wish you a better week than you’re having so far.
So 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?
I think it may help to not think of genes as lookup tables.
It's rather that genes act as blueprints for compound (protein/RNA) factories (which can also be potentially turned off/on). So the compounds that is produced may interact with the compound(s) that end up resulting in the hair color, and it may also interact with the compound that results in the hair length.
The problem is that any compound may in theory interact with any other compound, and there currently exists no way to 100% determine that they won't (for most compounds), which leaves open a huge space of possible chains of interactions.
In practice there are many interactions for every biological compound, which is the reason why medicine is so hard to develop and usually has a risk of side-effects.
It's also worth remembering that a cell isn't a well structured environment - it's essentially a bag of chemicals, with some slightly smaller bags of other chemicals inside it.
While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all.
So statements like a gene being "switched on" are very much an abstraction: whereas switching on a data line in a chip puts a very nice neat little voltage potential somewhere, switching on a gene basically just means the concentration of some "chemical" (protein) starts increasing and getting mixed into the cell (or ejected out of it by interacting with a bunch of other floating around things).
> While there's a lot of mechanisms which are adding order and structure to what happens, it's all still just a big concentrated aqueous solution of everything in the cell, diffusion processes and mixing and all.
Any closer look into biology completely dispels the notion of intelligent design. It’s over complicated, fragile, poorly architected and works, essentially, by side effects of all chemical reactions happening inside those bags of goo.
ARHGAP36[1] stimulates GTP catabolism. And since MC1R is a g protein coupled receptor and uses GTP as an energy source, changes in the levels GTP will change the response of MC1R[2] to MSH and ACTH. It will react less strongly when there is lower GTP, and more strongly when there is higher GTP[3].
A 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.
Also, 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.
I 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.
The 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".
Could 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.
Genetics 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.
The 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.
Yeah, 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.
Even 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.
