Something You Should Know
How Much of “You” is Heredity? & Martin Cooper: The Father of the Cellphone - SYSK Choice
27 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What word in the English language has the most meanings?
Today on Something You Should Know, what word in the English language has the most meanings, and it's only three letters long? Then, what is heredity, and how much are you really like your parents?
It's not like just because you look like one of your parents, you are more like them in some sort of deep way. You inherit 50% of your genes from one parent, 50% from the other. So genetically speaking, you're just a perfect 50-50 split between your parents.
Also, where did sneakers or tennis shoes come from? And you'll meet the father of the modern cell phone. He actually made the very first public cell phone call, and he has high hopes for the future.
Think about the potential of a cell phone. The UN did a study that showed that 1.2 billion people in Africa moved out of severe poverty, mostly because of their cell phones.
Chapter 2: How does heredity influence who we are?
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Hi.
Chapter 3: What misconceptions exist about heredity?
Welcome to Something You Should Know. We start today with an interesting question. Which word in the English language has the most different meanings? Unless you know it, you probably won't believe it. It's only three letters, but it has 645 meanings, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. And the word is... Think about it. You can run to the store. You can have a run in your stockings.
You can run over on your budget. Your car can run over a nail, and if it punctures the tire, then your car won't run right. You can run in a race. You can run up a tab. And if you're the boss, then you run the show.
Chapter 4: How did Martin Cooper create the first cell phone?
And the list goes on. One small word, lots and lots of meanings. 645 of them. And now I must run on to the next segment. And that is something you should know. When you hear the word hereditary, you probably think about things like eye color or hair color or height, things like that, things you inherit from your parents or that are passed down through generations of families.
But it turns out there's a lot of misunderstanding about what is and isn't hereditary and how much of who you are is determined by heredity versus your environment versus your personal choice. And science is learning so much about this, with so much more to discover in the future. It's a fascinating subject, and no one has tackled it better than Carl Zimmer.
Carl writes for the New York Times, he teaches science writing at Yale University, and he's author of a really interesting and really big book called She Has Her Mother's Laugh, The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. Hi Carl, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, thanks for having me.
Chapter 5: What impact did the first cellphone call have on communication?
So what is heredity? How do you define it? Most of us know what we mean by, you know, passing down from your parents your eye color or your hair color, but dive in a little deeper here.
Well, heredity is a word that's been around for a long time. I mean, the ancient Romans would talk about heredity, and their word was hereditas, and it referred to the rule's by which people inherited stuff from each other. And we still talk about inheriting money or houses or what have you. But by the 1800s, people were thinking about other things that people inherited.
Why was it that diseases seemed to run in families, for example? So people started to look for explanations for why each generation inherited resemble the previous generation in different ways. And that's what led to the discovery of genetics. But that doesn't necessarily mean that just saying like, oh, it's just genes is really the full answer to heredity.
Actually, that's just really kind of the starting point for understanding what heredity is and why it means so much to us.
Well, those are good questions. What is it and why does it mean so much to us?
You know, I think we have developed an idea that if we want to understand our own identity and who we are, we have to look to the past, that somehow we can zero in on some ancestor to figure out how our lives ended up the way they are. And, you know, so this is what drives the huge genealogy business today and the direct-to-consumer genetics testing. I mean, we want to
We want to find out, are we 27% Irish? And can we identify our great-great-great-great-great-grandmother? And maybe there's something like us in that person. But I would just broadly say that heredity is what the past gave the present and what the present is going to leave for the future.
How do you know or can you know or is it even important to know that if some relative or ancestor had some trait or some quirk or some behavior that you have, whether that's inherited or there are just so many traits and quirks and things that people have that you compare yourself to enough people, you're going to have some things in common?
I think a lot of things that we single out are just quirk. There are things that lots of people have, and it just so happens that one of your many, many relatives has it in common with you. It's a bit like astrology that way. Yeah, you can find some coincidences that seem compelling, but I think we need to sort of look deeper.
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Chapter 6: How did sneakers evolve from athletic shoes to everyday wear?
And to me, this underlying science is so fascinating and complex. There's genes, there are other kinds of molecules, there's culture, there are all sorts of things that go into making this connection between the past and the present. But if you want to really prove that you have your mother's laugh, science isn't quite ready to help you out just yet.
How does culture enter into this discussion?
Well, culture is really kind of like a separate channel of heredity that we humans have. I mean, we humans are really extraordinary that we really have a completely different channel of heredity that other species don't have. So, you know, we can give information, knowledge, customs to our children, to future generations. through language and through learning and so on.
I mean, we're the only species where there's really good evidence of teaching. That's really remarkable because what that means is that it's not like every generation has to just relearn how to crack open a nut with a rock.
Chapter 7: What role did cultural changes play in the popularity of sneakers?
You can teach children how to do it. And then when they grow up, they could get better at it and they can teach their kids that as well. And so you have this heredity of culture that's traveling down. It's been traveling down our species probably for hundreds of thousands of years, and it's a real secret to our success as a species.
So if... You can't really say that you have your mother's laugh because you inherited it in the sense that it was a direct connection and it passed down. Well, then what good is this discussion? If sometimes it's true and maybe it's not and maybe science can help and maybe it can't. Well, if it were in such the early stages, how come your book is so thick?
Well, one reason the book is so thick is because heredity has this long, deep, powerful history. Heredity means a lot to us. And so part of what I'm doing in the book is trying to explore why it means so much to us, and also what kind of trouble we can get ourselves into by searching for that value. There's some very dangerous aspects to our obsession with heredity.
You can look to the early 1900s in the United States. When genetics emerged, there were a number of very powerful voices who said, aha, we understand heredity completely. We understand why some people score higher on intelligence tests than others. Not only that, but we think that people who score low on these tests should be sterilized.
There were thousands upon thousands of people who were sterilized in the United States based on a very wrong notion about heredity. And Nazi Germany borrowed a lot of these ideas from the United States and took them to even more horrific extremes. So whether we really understand heredity yet or not, it still matters enormously to us.
And so we have to really understand what do we really know about heredity so far and how much of this is just almost like illusions that we're giving ourselves about it.
My guest is Carl Zimmer. He writes for the New York Times, and he's author of a new book called She Has Her Mother's Laugh, The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity.
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Chapter 8: How has mobile technology transformed lives globally?
Well, it's not random. And you can actually put a number on that sometimes. Scientists will call it heritability. And so you can say, well, for height, how much of the variation in a population is due to the variation in their genes? And the answer to that is about maybe 80%. So really, genes play a huge role in whether people are tall or short. So you get a lot from your parents in that regard.
There are other traits that are much less heritable, but there's still some heritability in them, like your personality. Are you kind of a neurotic person, for example? You get some of that genetically from your parents, but there's a lot of it is just environmental variation. And so it's not that heredity is meaningless. It's just that it's really complicated.
And it's really interesting, too, especially because now we can look at individual genes. So for height, I can give you a list of genes and say, I know that each of these genes plays a role in how tall you are. Now, each one might only, you know, make you maybe an eighth of an inch taller on average. So they're all tiny. But together, they are influencing your height in really profound ways.
And we're going to find other lists of genes for all sorts of things, for risks of diseases and so on and so forth. So we're just at the beginning of really drilling into this side of heredity. So it's an exciting time to be writing about this.
But let's say that you grow up in a house with parents who are anxious and depressed. And so when you get older, you have anxiety and depression. And is it worth discussing whether or not it's heredity or environment? Or it doesn't really matter. It's a moot point. It doesn't really get to the problem. It's just an interesting discussion.
I think for individual cases at this point, it probably usually doesn't matter. But it may be that in the future, there may be ways of learning how to better deal with those disorders by understanding those genes that put us at risk.
But very casually, people will say, well, you know, Fred's mother drank a lot, so that's why he drinks a lot. Or Fred's mother was sickly and was sick all the time, and that's why he's sick all the time. Can you claim that or not?
No, I don't. In a sort of, you know, casual individual basis, no, I don't think that anybody can really know that. There are definitely like some clear-cut cases, like let's say Huntington's disease, okay? Like we know that's caused by one mutation at one gene. And if your mother or father had Huntington's disease, you have a 50% chance of inheriting that one mutation. If you did...
You're going to get Huntington's disease. And so if you go on and develop Huntington's disease, people can say like, well, it's a shame that he got it from his mother. And we know that. That's clear cut. But those diseases are rare. So just say like, oh, he drinks because his father drank. Yeah, I think that's too glib.
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