[MUSIC].

So welcome back.
I, I want to talk now about the
environment, which is a huge complicating
factor in genetics.
Huntington's is a disease of the brain.
Which is unfortunately pretty much due to
a genetic determinism.
Your sanity is going to depend on a short
little string of nucleotides.
If you inherited the Huntington's DNA
sequence, it doesn't matter what you do.
You can eat an apple every day, you can
work out at the gym.
Nothing is going to help you.
You will eventually loose
your mind.
But Huntington's is an exception.
Because environment doesn't matter with
Huntington's.
Height is the norm.
Because like most of our traits it is
multi-factoral.
And that means that genes and environment
work together.
So you've had a pair of twins and were to
feed one twin just chocolates.
And the other twin states.
They, they wouldn't end up looking alike,
would they?
So, the students at my university, they
look like people who've eaten everything
they ever wanted to eat.
They've reached their full genetic
potential for height.
Back some years, American soldiers
fighting
the Japanese, the Koreans, the Vietnamese.
Found that compared to them, Asian
soldiers were much smaller.
But recent studies on American students
showed there's no difference in average
height
at all between young second or
third generation American Haitians, and
other Americans.
Haitians fed an American diet were as tall
as any other Americans.
So, what does that mean?
It means that having minimized the
differences in environmental influences.
The remaining differences in height are
due to genetic differences.
100 years ago, almost all Olympic medals
were won by white Europeans, Americans.
Because only the privileged few had
sufficient resources and the chance to
train.
In an unequal world, background and
opportunity determined who won the races.

In a true meritocracy,
with a level playing field, where all have
equal opportunity to succeed, the best
athletes are
going to be the ones with the best genes,
because that is all that is left to vary.
So there's a paradox here.
The more equal we make society, the more
important we will make the genes.
Now, traditionally genetists used twins to
determine the
impact of our genes on how we turned out.
But with 1.5
million twins around the world take part
in studies aiming to assess the relative
roles of genes in the environment from
aging to disease from partying to
religious belief.
But you probably know that there are two
types of twins.
These are identical twins here.
But there's also fraternal twins.
So look at this figure.
Identical twins, now they're going to
develop
when a fertilized egg splits into two.
So their DNA is going to be identical.
Fraternal or non-identical twins
They're going to develop from separate
eggs, fertilized by separate sperm.
So they share only half their genes.
So, twin studies is just a simple matter
of measuring how both
identical and fraternal twins turn out
if separately adopted into different
families.
You want separate families
because environments run in families, as
well as genes.
And you want to separate out the effects
of genes and environment.
If identical twins separated at birth turn
out more similar than fraternal twins for
a
particular trait, hair color, say, then
you
assume genetic determinism, that genes do
the job.
If the two types of twins are equally
similar for a trait such as the
language they speak, then that trait is
more likely to be due to the enivornment.
So let's give you a real world example.
Among identical twins, if one has epilepsy
then
in 59% of cases so will the other twin.
But in fraternal twins if one has
epilepsy, then in
only 19% of cases will the other twin also
have epilepsy.

So that's a 40% difference which indicates

a very strong genetic component
in epilepsy.
Now the end result of twin studies is an
estimate of heretiabilty for the trait.
Heritability is a slippery little concept.
Firstly, you have to understand that
heritability is a population average.
It does not refer to individuals.
If you say that the heritability for
height in New York
City is 90%, you are saying that 90% of
the variation
in height among people in New York City is
due to genes.
And the remaining 10% of the variation
between them is due to their environment.
The second thing to understand is that
heritability for
a trait is going to vary between
populations and environments.
Heritability for height in America is
going to be very
high, because everyone in America is very
well fed.
But in a country where starvation stalks
the streets, it's going to be much lower.
Because diet will be a factor.
Now, twin studies in the western world
have shown that,
almost all traits are, in part, influenced
by genetic differences.
Some characteristics, such as eye color,
now,
are going to show a strong influence,
genetic influence.
Because involvement Doesn't have much
impact on what eye color you have.
Others, like intelligence, have an
intermediate level.
Now when heritability
is lower, it's usually assumed that
selection on the trait is
less because the differences between
people
are mostly due to their environment.
But that's a dangerous assumption.
It could actually be because selection has
already eliminated genetic variance.
So let's explain that using IQ as an
example.
Now present studies indicate that the
heritability
of intelligence judged largely by IQ
spores, scores, Goes up linearly across
lifespan.
So from 30% in very young children to 40%,
50%, 60%, some people even say it
becomes 80% heritable by the time you're
middle aged.

Without saying that 80% of the reason that

we're all different in IQ is genetic.
And studies suggest that genes play a
majority
role in IQ scores, and environment is
important.
Particularly in young people.
Now remember that an average IQ is 100 so
potentially the 30% of variation in IQ due
to environment
could be very significant in determining
if someone has
an IQ of 120 or is in the subnormal range.
However, by the time an adopted child is
18, their IQ
is correlated with their biological
parents and not their adopted parents.
Logical link to this lecture by Mary
Wakefield on Robert
Prommins work, makes the point that the
environment, all that mass
coaching and tiger mothering can maybe
have an effect on the
kid's IQ when he's young, up him up a few
notches.
But as he gets older, his IQ will become
ever more closely correlated with
that of his blood relatives.
Okay.
So with genes having a majority role in
how our IQs turn out, does that mean
strong current selection for high IQs?
Not necessarily.
The habitability of of 70% or so implies
quite a bit of genetic variation in
populations.
Or else how could variations in IQ be due
to genes.
Now in most cases
the effect of selection is to reduce
genetic variation If
you remove individuals from their genetic
disadvantage, then variation is reduced.
We can speculate that low intelligence
might be a disadvantage, and
if less intelligent people are selected
against, their reproductive success is
less.
Then the alleles for their intelligence
are
going to be taken out of the population.
So for this reason, a low
heritability could be an indication that
selection has been strong.
All the genetic variation has already been
selected away.
And the variation that is left is due to
environment.
That's the flip side of the paradox I
mentioned before.

If people have level playing field, level

playing
field, then what's going to distinguish
them is their genes.
But if strong selective pressures have
already removed
most genetic variants, then any
differences between
people is going to be due to what's left.
In this case, the environment.
Let's now have a look and see how gene was
in twin studies connect up.
Using as an example, a study published
online in Lancet on the 28 February, 2013.
It's called identification of risk loci
with shared effects on five major
psychiatric
disorders, a genome wide analysis.
So it's psychiatric illnesses,
schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism,
major depression and ADHD is seen very
different.
Yet some years back researchers had seen
clues of overlapping genetic effects in
identical twins.
One twin might have schizophrenia, while
the other had bipolar dis, disorder.
So researchers had also
examined the genes.
So a few families in which
these psychiatric disorders seemed
particularly common.
They found a few unusual disruptions
of chromosomes, so linked to psychiatric
illnesses.
But what surprised them was that while one
person with a mutation Might get one
disorder.
A relation with exactly the same mutation,
but a different disorder.
So they concluded that two different
diagnoses
can have the same genetic risk factor.
Starting in 2007, a large group of
researchers began investigating genetic
data generated by studies in 19 countries,
that allowed them to compare.
333,332 people will have psychiatric
illnesses,
and 27,888 people free of the illnesses.
The researchers in the
[UNKNOWN]
study analyzed scans of these people's
DNA, looking for variations in
any of several million places along the 3
billion DNA letters.
The question.
Did people with psychiatric illnesses tend
to have a distinctive DNA pattern
in any of those locations when compared to

people free of illness?

The researchers found four DNA regions
that
conferred to small risk of psychiatric
disorders.
For two, it's not clear what genes are
involved or what they did.
The other two involved genes that are a
part of calcium
channels which are used when neurons send
signals in the brain.
So let's make it clear.
This new study does not mean that
the genetics and psychiatric disorders are
simple.
Researchers say, there seem to be hundreds
of genes involved in the gene
variations discovered in the new study
confirm
only a small risk of psychiatric disease.
So we are just looking then, at four
genetic glitches
that can nudge the brain along a path to
mental illness.
what do we make of the fact that the
same mutations can have drastically
different effects on different people?
The answer is likely to be that which
disease if any disease
develops is going to depend on multiple
other genetic or environmental factors.
So for example, many genes are redundant.
But that would mean, that if you knock out
a gene, break
it, one or more other genes might be able
to take its place.
The particular gene that may be true for
you but not for me.
I might
not have a suitable replacement gene, you
might have a suitable replacement gene.
Alternatively, you may have a particular
allele which could
be devastating for you, but it never gets
switched on.
It switches on in someone else when they
confront
a stress, you are lucky enough to miss out
on.
Stress is the key word here.
You could be fine left alone with your
particular alleles
until a stress comes along and switches
those alleles on.
Environmental stress has even played a
role in the expression
in some monogenic diseases because
stresses make them much worse.
So, for example.
Patients with a genetic disease cystic

fibrosis
produce a lot of mucus in their lungs.
That's a great breeding ground for the
bacteria pseudomonas.
The bacteria forces a lot more coughing,
and even more mucus.
So for many patients with cystic fibrosis,
the symptoms of their condition are due
to the combined action of the mutation And
the stress caused by the bacteria.
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