if you’re a boy, you only have 47.5% in common with your father because he only contributed a y-chromosome, whereas your mom contributed the much-larger x-chromosome.


I’m only a dude with ADHD who likes biology, but by brother is an epigenetic researcher/professor at BYU, and that’s the kind of stuff we usually talk about (because of my interest, but also to avoid politics 🤣). Getting into the the epigenetic factors is amazing and will let you realize there’s sooooo much we still have to learn here…

And probably will be for a long time. Seems like every time we think we’ve identified the terminal end of discovery for inheritance or biological function, and start working toward it (eg. Human genome project and “GATTACA”), we find out that there is another distant horizon we didn’t even know to be looking for.

The “Epigenome” is obviously one that we’re in the thick of perusing now, and maybe we thought that would be the end.

But after that we even have to delve into the “microbiome” or the genetics of microbiota in our bodies.
How pervasive could effects from our resident bacteria be on our own biology (and by extension, psychology etc)? What is affected?

As my brother put it:

“Pretty much if you can imagine it, it’s affected.”

We’ve got a long way to go and we keep accelerating. Exciting.