1min chapter

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16 | Coleen Murphy on Aging, Biology, and the Future

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

CHAPTER

Is There a Difference Between Humans and Worms?

There's one gen but t it kind of plays slightly different roles depending on which or when it's talking to exactly. For example, you can have an important transcription factor that is mostly used for metabolic purposes in the major tissues, but could be used for a different function in a neurance. And it's amazingly clever that lution did all this without any foresight. Ri withny selection is an amazing thing. But i was going to add to a your point about the the number. So this came up at a meeting recently, where some one was discounting the importance of seelganse based on this argument that there had so few cells and humans have so many. What those

00:00
Speaker 1
So
Speaker 2
in the sense that there's one gen but t it kind of plays slightly different roles depending on which or when it's talking to exactly. For
Speaker 1
example, you can have an important transcription factor that is mostly used for metabolic purposes in the major tissues, but it could be used for a different function in a neurance and so that's the kind of thing that we're figuring out now. And it's
Speaker 2
amazingly clever that lution did all this without any foresight. Ri withny selection is
Speaker 1
an amazing thing. But i was going to add to a your point about the the number. So this came up at a meeting recently, where some one was discounting the importance of seelganse based on this argument that there had so few cells and humans have so many. But fundamentally, what those cells do at the sobiological level, or at the metabolic level, is very well conserved. And so a, it's just a matter of, ah, you know, worms actually may have a harder job. So put this out there co they only have 302 neurons, yet they survey their entire environment and make decisions about where they should go, what they should eat, what they should avoid, using only those few nurons, and only about a hundred of them are our sensory norons, ok? And so this idea, you know, like if you think about the mouse o factory bwere have a neuron where there's one receptor for every one of those nerons. Worms don't do that. They have many receptors for every nuron. So they are actually trying to figure out much more complicated things within each every single neuron before they can make a decision out there. They can't, obviously, figure out the same level of things, but they do some pretty, i think, interesting calculation.

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