The genome diversity of major crops tells the story of their evolution

Seems like a promising task for LLMs.

So, like the middle managers for the genome.

Now as far as assemblies what is interesting there, we never sequencing the human genome . What we did was sequence a lot of the human genome "except for the hard parts, seems impossible". Well in the past few years the T2T projects has successfully sequenced the whole dang thing. Just because something is "hard" or "more repetitive" don't mean ain't nothing interdasting in dere.

This degree of overlap is entirely expected and accepted and has been for many decades before fully genome sequence gave us hard numbers.

Can you clarify your second paragraph? Heritability is not a controversial topic but if you are saying the estimates are often abused, then I definitely will agree.

There are clearly dominant traits (and recessive traits). Huntington’s disease is the canonical example. If a student does not understand Mendelian genetics first they will not be able to understand complex quantitative genetics.

Your last statement is extreme. Do you also think that all of Newtonian physics is BS and should not be taught to kids.

Eye color and hair color have been studies pretty intensively and they definitely have models which are more complex than "if you have value Y at position 37 of gene X, you have blue eyes". The way it's normally stated is that we can explain 50% of the heritance of eye color using a limited set of SNPs.

What we don't have is a comprehensive model of how complex phenotypes arise from genotypes. This is only because of historical oversimplification, and partly because the underlying causality of phenotypes is remarkably sophisticated due to a combination of many factors, overlapped with enormous amounts of noise and confounding factors.

Adding FUD doesn't help. There are perfectly knowable things to teach kids —

- Blue-eyed parents have blue-eyed kids.

- Brown eyed parents have brown-eyed kids, if they are homozygous.

- Sometimes, two brown-eyed parents have recessive alleles! But it's rare!

- A blue-eyed parent and a brown eyed parent will have ~50% blue-eyed children

You don't have to 100% characterize all hazel and green shades to capture most of the state of knowledge. These are 99.9% true. You're just trying to cast doubt on an increasingly well-understood field, akin to people trying to pick apart climate change research.

"Genetics" isn't just "protein coding genes". Nor do genomes being X% similar mean the organisms must be X% similar.

Whether and when a gene gets expressed is everything. The non-coding part of the DNA quite often plays a role in that, as do many other factors.

Non-protein-coding genes are still genes.

> Children are still taught there are such things as dominant traits, and genes for eye colour

I'm 90% sure you've got some motte-and-bailey definitions going on here. Dominant traits as commonly defined are plentiful, e.g. various skin issues.

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/112780705488252948

which I think is usually ahead of it's time but the genetics unit seems backwards in that it doesn't say a word about molbio and has the same experiments were you observe the same few phenotypes that are sorta-kinda described by Mendelian inheritance, not telling you that those are the only ones, that we can't trust Mendel's lab notebook with the peas, etc.

"Personal Genomics" in the sense of 23 and me has been a wash. For one thing the SNP approach is limited in what it can do, but even if you had a real sequence teasing out the personal variation in terms of Genes x Environment can only go so far. What's interesting to me about genomics is the things that are the same and can be understood to a great deal mechanistically such as all of us Eukaryotes sharing a common "operating system" in terms of the machinery of protein synthesis, cell division and such. Hundreds of genes are known that affect diseases such as asthma, diabetes and schizophrenia and even if a polygenic risk score is possible a doctor is going to give a person with a high risk score the same advice as a person with a low risk score and give the same tests (fasting glucose, A1C) except maybe he ought to be a little more emphatic to the high risk person and the high risk person should take it more seriously.

(For that matter my experience with animals leads me to think animals are much more the same as us than different even when it comes to things like intelligence and communication. My belief was confirmed when my stray cat, "Bob B" seemed to understand that his path to a better life went through me when after 2 1/2 months of stonewalling me he got quite articulate in terms of using his "voice" and gestures such as pointing at the window and door to indicate he wants to go out, pointing at the TV and having an expression that seemed like disapproval, etc. I think these behaviors are basically intrinsic to mammals and birds if not some reptiles. You can certainly learn to communicate with animals better but a lot of it is instinctual)

Whoa. I think your wording works more accurately observing previous beliefs are only a subset of a bigger picture, and are at times context dependent in such bigger pictures.

1. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/d9/34/04/3395571... 2. https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/1c/60/8d/4ddfe08...