Princeton University Anthropology Professor Agustín Fuentes explains why race is a social construct — as in, biological race isn’t real. Then, learn how plants pass down “bad” memories to their offspring through epigenetics.
Princeton University Anthropology Professor Agustín Fuentes explains why race is a social construct — as in, biological race isn’t real. Then, learn how plants pass down “bad” memories to their offspring through epigenetics.
Additional resources from Agustín Fuentes:
Plants pass down "bad" memories to their offspring, which can inhibit growth by Grant Currin
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Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/biological-race-is-a-myth-w-agustin-fuentes
CODY: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from curiosity-dot-com. I’m Cody Gough.
ASHLEY: And I’m Ashley Hamer. Today, you’ll learn about why biological race isn’t real, with Princeton University Professor Agustín Fuentes. Then, you’ll learn about how plants pass down “bad” memories to their offspring.
CODY: Let’s satisfy some curiosity.
This going to surprise you if you've never heard it before: race isn't real. Not biologically, anyway: there's no gene or even set of genes you can point to and identify someone's race. This is a really tough thing to grasp, since race is such a big part of culture and society. But today's guest is going to make things a whole lot clearer. Agustín Fuentes is a professor of anthropology at Princeton University, and here's what he told Natalia and me when we asked him: what's a common misconception people have about humans?
[CLIP 4:32]
Again, that was Agustín Fuentes, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University. He's also the author of several books, including "Why We Believe: Evolution and the Human Way of Being" and "The Creative Spark: How Imagination Made Humans Exceptional." You can find links to pick those up in the show notes.
Human parents pass down memories to their children all the time. It turns out that plant parents do too — and it’s causing harm to their offspring. These particular “memories” are stored in the twists and folds of the plant’s DNA, and researchers just learned that they can be passed from parent to offspring with less-than-ideal effects.
The plant in question is Arabidopsis thaliana, otherwise known as thale cress. It’s a small, squat plant with broad leaves that geneticists just love to study. But beyond the lab, it’s basically a weed. You’ve probably seen specimens peeking out of cracks in the sidewalk. Once a year, this otherwise-inconspicuous organism sprouts a bouquet of flowery stalks that can grow as tall as 10 inches or 25 centimeters.
At least, that’s usually the way it happens. Sometimes, the conditions aren’t right for such a big investment of energy and nutrients. Environmental stress can make an individual plant decide against sprouting those stalks.
That decision should stay with the individual plant — when it produces offspring, they start with a clean slate, blissfully unaware of the stress their parent endured. But the researchers behind this new study found that that doesn’t always happen. Plants sometimes pass memories of stress from their own environments down to their offspring. And that can keep the offspring from growing right and reduce its chances of survival.
How is the memory passed down through the generations? The answer isn’t oral tradition, it’s epigenetics!
Epigenetics is all about the way DNA is packaged. Most of the info in DNA is stored in the nucleic acids — A, T, C, and G. But there’s also information baked into the way strands of DNA are wrapped around proteins called histones.
The problem for the plants seems to lie with two proteins that have control over the timing of a plant’s flowering and over its chemical memory. Scientists have known for years that some epigenetic information can be passed down through the generations, and there’s a lot of research into how that plays out in humans. But these two proteins cause way too much epigenetic information to be passed down.
The new research shows that they can cause problems by altering the histones and changing how the next generation’s DNA is packaged. They basically prevent a normal reset of the packaging instructions, which leads to offspring that behave as if they experienced the same stressors their parents did.
The hope is that one day, we can learn to manipulate these epigenetic memories to breed plants that can better adapt to their environments — and stop getting held back by their parents’ memories.
Let’s recap the main things we learned today
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CODY: Today’s last story was written by Grant Currin, and edited by Ashley Hamer, who’s the managing editor for Curiosity Daily.
ASHLEY: Curiosity Daily is produced and edited by Cody Gough.
CODY: Join us again tomorrow to learn something new in just a few minutes.
ASHLEY: And until then, stay curious!