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I'm really honored
to be doing a Henry Stewart talk.
My name is Temple Grandin.
I am a professor of animal science
at Colorado State University.
And I'm going to be
discussing some of the things
that we discuss in our new
book, Genetics and the Behavior
of Domestic Animals--
the Second Edition.
Just came out really recently.
One of the questions that
people are always asking
is, how much of animal behavior is
nature-- in other words, genetics?
And how much is nurture, which
would be the environment.
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There's an age-old question.
How much of behavior is nature, and
how much of behavior is nurture?
And in our book, Genetics and
the Behavior of Domestic Animals,
myself and many
other scientists have
chapters to answer that question.
A lot has been learned about
genetics in the last 10 years.
And the mechanisms are complex.
The old Mendelian genetics
might only explain about 25%
of inheritance.
What a lot of people don't
realize is that only 1%
of the entire double helix
actually codes for proteins.
That's what's called the exome.
What does the rest of the genome do?
When I was in graduate school
student back in the '80s,
they used to call it junk DNA.
I never believed in junk DNA.
How could so much of
the genome just be junk?
We know now with the Encode Project
that was just published in 2013,
scientists have learned that a good
part of that other so-called junk
DNA probably is the
genes' operating system.
Something has to tell the coding DNA
when to code for different things,
otherwise you just have
big cancerous blobs.
Maybe there's some junk DNA.
But there's some of
that definitely has
got to be the genes'
operating system.
