It is easy to fall into thinking about inherited traits in a very reductionist way: to mentally assign to each trait a gene of its own along that famous double helix. Thus, the gene for blue eyes may lie next to the gene for left handedness, and then there's the gene for brown hair, for a large nose, and so forth.
But it doesn't work that way. You aren't a bundle of atomistic traits. You are a whole, and the genome that produces you, produces you as a whole. Much of what you inherit, then, you inherit only through patterns that one can only 'see' if one zooms out from such a gene-by-gene look, to look at the whole genome.
Here's a relevant story from CELL.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867417310061?via%3Dihub
I learned of this indirectly. I became aware a couple of weeks ago that there exists a suspicion in some quarters that Jeremy Bentham, the notorious inventor of utilitarian ethics and the Panopticon, may have been on the autism spectrum. Here is a link (thanks HC) to an article on point:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/jeremy-bentham-head-autism-testing-exhibition
At its end, that article refers to the "cutting edge" techniques that are considered necessary to tease the desired information out of what is still available of the Bentham genome. I started googling to get a better sense of what those new techniques were, and the above-linked story from CELL, came to me.
Personally, I don't really care whether Bentham was on the spectrum. But the science that goes into finding out, that DOES intrigue me.
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