Bret Weinstein

They are repetitive sequences.

They're written in DNA, but it's basically just a repeated series of letters again and again and again.

The telomere, basically the number of repeats that are there, dictates how many times a cell line can duplicate.

It loses repeats each time it duplicates.

And when it gets down to a critically low number, it stops reproducing.

Now, we've talked before about why that system exists.

The short version is in creatures like us, it prevents cancers from happening because if a cell line runs away and just starts reproducing, it runs into this limit, the hayflick limit, and stops reproducing.

So it prevents cancer, but it limits the amount of repair that we can do in a lifetime.

So it causes us to senesce, to age and grow feeble as we do so.

But what it said to me when I was doing that work was,

that there is a kind of information that can be stored in genomes in DNA that is not protein-oriented.

It's not what we would call allelic.

It's not written in three-letter codons.

It's actually a number stored the same way you would store a variable in a computer program, right?

The telomere, the length of the telomere,

is a count of how many times a cell line is allowed to divide over a lifetime.

It's a number.

And what occurred to me all those years ago was that the ability to store a number in the genome is fantastically powerful.

What it means, if you could store a lot of numbers in the genome, is that you could describe creatures by allotting something, either a quantity of material or an amount of time in development, that you could specify things in the language of numbers that you can't specify in the language of amino acids.

So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table is that the evolutionary process has built a system in which variables, in which integers are stored