Bret Weinstein

And they vary in length.

They vary in length a lot so that you may have a species in which the genome is very homogeneous.

But between populations, there will have been change in the length of these microsatellites, changes that, as far as we know, don't make any difference.

But if you're a biologist in the field and you want to know

If the trees in this valley are more closely related to the trees in Valley A or Valley B, you can look at a particular microsatellite and you can say these trees have a microsatellite at this location that is more similar in length to Population A than to Population B. Thus, with some confidence, we think it's more close.

It evolved from Population A, something like that.

So we use them as a tool for assessing things like relatedness.

But we don't typically think of them as a storage modality for a kind of information that might be useful.

So the hypothesis that I'm putting on the table, and by the way, these things are extremely common in the genome.

There are many more variable number tandem repeats

in the genome than there are genes, right?

And my point is, I don't know whether evolution uses them as a place to store variables that then become important in describing creatures, but evolution is a very clever process.

And the ability to store a variable, I feel highly confident that there will be many variables stored in many different ways.

that there are ways in which you can store a variable in triplet codon language, but they're clumsy, they're crude.

So you can have things like...

a dosage compensation.

You can have a gene that's repeated multiple times, and the more copies you have, the larger dose of the product that you get, right?

So if you have three copies of alcohol dehydrogenase, you'll have more alcohol tolerance than two copies, something like that.

So that demonstrates a way in triplet codon language that you can store a variable.

But what I'm arguing is that there's, at least in principle, the possibility for a vast library of variables that have developmental implications for the way creatures look that allows you to go.