Bret Weinstein

in DNA and those integers dictate phenomena like developmental timing, turning on and off something like the growth of one of those phalanx, the phalanges in the fingers, if you could radically increase the

number that dictated the length of one of those bones, then selection would effectively be in a position to play with adjacent forms.

So am I confusing you or is this making sense?

No, it's making sense.

Okay.

So the question is, all right, the telomere is a special case.

The telomere exists at the end of a chromosome and it can only exist at the end of a chromosome because of the way it functions.

So a telomere is not actually just a string, it's actually a loop.

And the telomere loops back and at the very tip there's a little section where the DNA is not double-stranded, it's single-stranded.

And that single strand inserts between two other strands of DNA.

So if you loop the DNA at the end of the chromosome back,

It's called a D-loop.

And then you get this one little single-stranded DNA that inserts between a double-stranded and makes a very tiny triple-stranded like cap so that it holds the loop in place.

You can't do that in the middle of a chromosome.

So it's not like there are telomeres all over the place.

But what there are are a bunch of sequences that were traditionally dismissed as junk DNA.

that have been used as a molecular marker in biology for decades.

We use something called microsatellites.

So a microsatellite is a repetitive sequence in DNA that does not code for a protein.

It's just like a telomere in that way.