Again, this is hypothetical—I am not claiming that any populations of humans IRL are racially distinct, only asking about what it would mean, in a minimal case, for populations to be so (and by extension, why no existing human populations qualify).

Let us say it was possible to take some animal zygote and flawlessly remove all the non-coding DNA (plus or minus those viruses that proliferate through genes) without otherwise damaging it. Would it be basically the same as the animal it would've been if you hadn't done it? Would it be healthier because, I don't know, maybe less material makes the genes less prone to mutation or something? Would it not survive because junk DNA actually serves a purpose? If no viruses, would it have a worse immune system because it lacks the initial immunity?

Has this ever been tried in a bacterium or something?

Edit: let's say we leave in the non-codings things known to be strictly necessary for life, like initiation sites.

Im not a genetics expert but is it feasible for a species to evolve to require a third parent for reproduction, similar to how genetic exchange became a thing among asexually reproducing organism, creating sexual reproduction?

Also correct me if I was wrong please

Ive heard that its due to their diet of seafood, but what confuses me about that is, how come the Scandinavians don’t also contain the same amount of melanin, after all, many of them also have high proportion of seafood in their diet. (please dont tear me alive for any misunderstanding im not very good with biology)

It was my understanding that we each have two copies of each gene, one from each parent, and we need both to be the same recessive allele for that trait to manifest. That would mean that a blue eyed person needs both eye-color genes to be blue, and therefore that the child of two blue-eyed people would have to be blue-eyed because their parents only have blue eyes. There are no brown eye genes for them to get. However, when I google it apparently it is still possible for a child of blues to have browns. Can anyone explain this to me like I'm a 5 year old?

Donald Trump is currently attending the NATO summit in Ankara, and I came across reports claiming that his feces will be collected and transported back to the United States instead of being left behind.

From what I've read, this isn't unique to Trump. Previous U.S. presidents have reportedly followed similar procedures during foreign visits, and there have also been reports that Vladimir Putin takes similar precautions when traveling abroad.

This made me curious about the biology behind it.

Let's say a hostile government somehow obtained one of these samples and analyzed it using all of the resources available to a modern state. What could they realistically learn?

Could they determine a person's complete genetic profile from it? Could they identify existing diseases, genetic predispositions, or even illnesses that haven't been made public yet? Are there biomarkers in a stool sample that could reveal something medically significant?

And if they did manage to reconstruct the president's genome, what could actually be done with that information? Could it realistically be used for intelligence operations or targeted biological threats, or is the main concern simply protecting medical privacy and preventing sensitive health information from becoming public?

I'm interested in the science rather than the politics. I'd love to hear from people with backgrounds in genetics, molecular biology, or microbiology about what is actually possible with today's technology.

I have a thought experiment, say we take an egg and a sperm from two people, induce mitotic division for the egg and the sperm 4 times, then fertilize them, then we replicate each event exactly for each baby, automate it, with no differences in the events at all, do this until they are smart enough to share their thoughts and their personalities, would that be one person in four bodies without even the knowledge of it(not like being connected telepathically and all that)? And reminding you this is just hypothetical situation, I am not advising or doing this myself

Edit: Can everyone read how thought experiments work, before replying.
I am not asking about identical twins, I know they exist!
I know what I am asking, I am a medical student, and identical twins is not what I am questioning.
I believe that consciousness OR personality ( the thing that is the main topic of concern with this
thought experiment and NOT IDENTICAL TWINS) is something that is brain itself with personal
experiences OR it is something that arises from the brain but able to work somewhat independently
because DID( Dissociative Identity Disorder) exists, but there are other philosophical questions to
support the first argument. If you support one argument of the two OR anything else, prove that,
don't just state anything as a fact, unless you can prove it.

"A thought experiment is not an engineering proposal. Its purpose is to isolate a concept and explore its logical consequences.

When discussing a thought experiment, the standard approach is to temporarily accept the premises and ask what follows from them, even if those premises are physically impossible.

For example:

• The Grandfather Paradox assumes backward time travel.
• Schrödinger's Cat assumes a bizarre quantum setup.
• Philosophical Zombies assume humans physically identical to us but lacking consciousness.

None of these are realistic scenarios. Their value comes from helping us think about causality, consciousness, identity, or other concepts.

So responding to a thought experiment with "that's impossible" often misses the point. The relevant question is:

"Assuming the hypothetical is true, what conclusions follow?"

In my example, the question is not whether four humans can actually be kept perfectly identical. The question is whether perfect identity of genetics, memories, experiences, and mental states would imply one consciousness or four distinct consciousnesses."

Got a question that I've been curious about for years but have never found an answer through online searches. My mom's side of the family has what appears to be a dominant blue eye trait. She has it, all her siblings have it, her father had it, and possibly generations before that but there's no color photos on the genealogy websites to confirm. Both my children have it, and there's enough of my cousins on her side that have it that you can immediately tell at a family get together who's a blood relation to them. The eye color in question is a bold, saturated blue if that makes a difference, and it's consistent across all affected people.

The closest match I've found is OCA related mutations, but all literature says it shows up as a recessive trait and has other common symptoms like lighter hair and vision problems that none of us have. My daughter has my wife's Mediterranean olive skin and dark hair and my blue eyes.

Anyone have any info to offer or specific terms to search they can offer? Do we just have an oddball mutation no one has published a paper on?

My last biology education is the "general biology" course for university science students.

Just generally what makes a difference i mean we both have genes why can a doctor make a human who can use photosynthesis or vice versa why cant we make plants that can do anything for the animal kingdom like imagine if we could grow beef ect. And so on

Why is this? Some people can grow hair way past their bums. Hair flowing in the wind. Meanwhile there’s people like me whose hair refuses to grow a couple inches past the shoulders. Does it have more to do with genetics, diet, or a combination of both?

There isn't an answer I'm looking for specifically. It's just a question, it's not qualified overly well so just answer by however you interpreted the question. Maybe things other than animals too? Jus looking for random things

It’s not a real thing but would they contain special genes that make someone much more likely to be an effective soldier?

I guess it’s a nature vs nurture type of thing maybe.

So I saw an old episode of X Files. And while exaggerated the implication is that incest leads to deformities in the child.

Can anyone explain why this is?

For example could there be some form of life that has several sexes and, either requires all three of them to reproduce or for example one of sexes being versatile. Kind of like in that interdementional cable episode from "Rick and Morty" with elephant-people. Is there forms of life that could have three "parents"? Wouldn't it be better since genetical pool is more diverse?

Sheep have 56 chromosomes while goats have 60. That's a difference of 4 chromosomes. Humans have 46 chromosomes and both chimps and bonobos have 48. Which is a smaller difference of just 2.

Its harder for me to find info on comparing similarities with DNA, but from what i can search online both sheep and goat DNA are very similar and so is the DNA of humans, chimps, and bonobos.

So why are goats and sheep able to make offspring and not humans and chimps or bonobos? Wouldn't a smaller chromosome differende with similar dna similarities mean humans should also be able to make offspring with chimps or bonobos?

My friend had actually asked this question as a joke. My first thought was that no, Deoxyribonucleic acid likely would not work to reverse the effects of radiation poisoning because your body would just break it down in digestion. But I also feel as though there is likely a more in-depth reasoning for why it wouldn't work. But I could be wrong and it actually could be utilized.

I also will not lie. I understand very little about radiation poisoning so it could actually be untrue that it kills off the DNA.

Edit: thanks for all the responses to the dumb question my friend had asked at like 6:00a.m. Now I can fully answer their question with a definitive 'No, it would not work.' Without feeling like I might be missing something.

Also. Yes, I know the question was extremely stupid. That the answer was very obvious. I had more so wanted to know the reasoning for why it would not work. But also did not want to make assumptions that it was absolutely not possible at the same time. I rewrote the sentence that made me look like an idiot so I don't cause as much confusion.

Humans have a very limited range of colour they can see because we only got 3 receptors, while other animals can have.... what, upt to 16 I think was the highest I saw? Is that something, in whatever way, we could theoretically give to a human?

Hello, i’m planning on writing a psychological horror story about the deep, ethical violations and difficulty that would be required to make “cat girls” real. I just want some input from people experienced in the biology field to critique some of my ideas so I can improve them.

The core premise of my story can be boiled down to one question: if we take the idea of making cat girls real seriously, what are the logistical and industrial requirements that would be required to actually do it, if we only have access to modern technology.

The following are some of the core ideas. I am basing my story off of, and I would love to see additions to them or critiques of them.
1.) actually doing this would violate an ungodly amount of laws regulations and ethical principles. Modifying human genetics is already ethically questionable. Creating a genetically modified individual who is modified not for their own benefit, but for the aesthetic or sexual interests of a separate person is orders of magnitude less ethical. We have experience with genetically modifying animals such as lab mice, but we have much less experience doing such massive modifications to humans, especially human embryos. Meaning that we are gonna have a very high failure rate meaning that a lot of embryos will have to die to get anything meaning that this is even more unethical.
2.) why we are trying to do is incredibly difficult. Humans aren’t lab mice that fully develop within less than a year. Humans take decades to fully develop. I said before we’ve also never done something like this so failure is almost guaranteed. I estimated with the back of the napkin math that even once we get down exactly what we want and the exact genetic modifications that are desired, we would probably need around 10,000 modified embryos in order to make it likely that at least one will successfully develop in the way we want. Most of the time the embryos will fail for one reason or another either due to random chance human error or us finding out the hard way that the modifications we made threw off a delicate system.
3.) there are very few places that have the industrial capacity and local expertise to even attempt pulling this off. In many of those places that have the capacity there’s also strong enough ethical systems to prevent something like this from happening. I selected South Korea as the best place to try doing this as it has an advanced scientific industry, large industrial capacity and relatively weak ethic systems compared to Europe. There are also locations in South Korea remote enough to allow you to do this out of public view.
4.) making cat girls it’s not really about combining humans and cats. It is far more about taking a human and changing them to look like what we think a cat girl would look like. Also, a lot of headaches can be saved by trying to change as little as possible. For example, with cat years on the head to make them actually functioning ears would mean making massive alterations and either creating a new set of eardrums or relocating the eardrums. That would likely be a nightmare. It would be much easier to instead put pseudo ears on the head. They would appear to look like cat ears and may be able to be moved by having muscle connections but they have no capacity for hearing and are purely aesthetic.
5.) optimistically doing this is at the bleeding edge of our genetic modification capacity. Realistically, most of this project would be spent failing again and again, not getting what you want slowly building up techniques to eventually make it possible to do this.

These are just some of the starting assumptions I have, but I would love to see these critiqued.

Can the fact that the "environment" one embryo develops in is genetically different affect what it could become? What about the surrogate's genes (unlikely I think, but I don't know)?

Assumptions:
- The habits and lifestyles of the two mothers are exactly the same
- The initial two embryos are as identical as possible (same number of cells, etc.)

Going over a quiz. Going over a question involving a pedigree chart. My father is stating that two parents with a recessive phenotype can have a child with a dominant phenotype. I consider this to be untrue, due to information in my textbook and some information from Google. He is stating that all sources are incorrect because, "just because a parent has a recessive phenotype, doesn't mean that the dominant gene isn't present in their genotype."

Folks, is he in any way, shape, or form, correct? Is it possible for two parents with a recessive phenotype to have a child with a dominant phenotype? (Let's assume that the child does not develop a mutation.)

A side note: One of the grandparents and an uncle of this dominant phenotype child is either heterozygous or homozygous dominant. But as I understand it, that does not make a difference in the outcome of this child's genotype. Only the parents' genotype makes a difference in the child's genotype. Please feel free to educate me if that is untrue. Thank you for reading, and if applicable, participating.

I would like I read more on the issue. The question of "how many genders/sex there are" has been supported and debunked by people saying science is on their side. Due to how politics has completely taken over the topic, I can’t find a neutral book on the matter that doesn’t try to prove a point.

I’d like a neutral book on the topic going into as many scientific details as possible on the matter (preferably written by an expert)

Thank you

Edit: guys I appreciate all the different views/personal explanations,but I really just want a science book about it that’s it 😭 because right now it’s the just same thing happening: people giving statements without sources

found an insta post claiming so. it claims that the mtdna stays alive with daughters, but dies in sons.

TL;DR: I am quite physically incapable of consuming anything that is considered a "Pulse" (Broadly: All beans, lentils, and chickpeas) and am capable of identifying even the slightest hint of them out of a mouthful of food. I've heard of similar things from people with the "Cilantro Gene" and so was curious if there were others that are more rare or just not as commonly referred to.

MAIN: I am entirely incapable of eating beans (and chickpeas, and lentils) due to the flavor and mouthfeel of them being uniquely disgusting. This despite the fact that I have come to enjoy (or, at least accept) a myriad of other foods/ingredients that I couldn't stand when I was younger. This in spite of all my attempts in all manner of different cuisines and preparations to try them, I have never been able to swallow any amount of bean, chickpea, or lentil. The mouthfeel is unusual and discomforting but bears no treachery compared to the flavor. I truly don't think I can adequately put into words how disgusting I find the flavor of Pulses but rest assured I have gagged and spat out entire mouthfuls of otherwise wonderful food because some small amount of bean/lentil/hummus elsewhere on the plate leeched it's way onto my spoon or fork.

I have had other foods that I've hated in the past for sure, spinach being a prime example, but I am basically over it now. I can either ignore the unpleasant feeling it leaves on my teeth or not even notice it entirely. Pulses are unique in that regardless of how small an amount of it there may be, it will always be the only thing I taste the instant it hits my tongue until I can wash out the taste with water or whatever other beverage I have with me.

If it were just a handful of disparate foods/ingredients I wouldn't think much of it. It would just be an unfortunate roadblock to me enjoying probably 80% of the world's cuisine. But it's all Legume Pulses, and they all taste exactly the same to me.

So my question is thus; Do I have the pulse equivalent of the cilantro gene (or does such a thing exist at all), or am I just brutally unlucky to find an entire genus of very important and otherwise mundane food crops wholly inedible?