This is the first cake that I've ever made the recipe had 418 steps and I
really hope it tastes good cause man it took a long time. I am Kurtis Baute and
this is The Scope of Science and I have to be quiet because I'm in a library.
Genes are the recipes that make life and we have a lot of them. If you wanted to print out
all of the genetic information in an individual on paper like this, to do that
you would have to fill a lot of filing cabinets. You'd have to fill 67 cabinets.
That's all of these cabinets, because we have a lot of information in
us. We have around 20,000 genes that make proteins in our bodies. And to make that
a little more palatable I want you to pretend that instead of 'genes that make
proteins' were talking about 'recipes that make cakes' I'll explain. Just like genes,
recipes evolve - the good ones get passed on. If I make a cake and it tastes good,
and I give the recipe to my friend, and if they like the recipe they might pass
it on to their friends, and maybe somewhere along the line someone
modifies it and puts in more sugar and that recipe gets passed on even more.
They change and they evolve over time. But, if I made a recipe that tasted like
socks and I passed that on to my friend, well, I'd be mean and also my friend
probably wouldn't pass it on. So just as with recipes, if you have genes that make you
more successful (more likely to have offspring), those genes are more
likely to get passed on. My mom passed recipes onto me and she also passed her
genes on to me, roughly half of my DNA comes from my mom and from my dad and
they say roughly half because I share more DNA in common with my mom than with
my dad. It isn't a perfectly even split and a lot of things get garbled up when
they get passed on. It's a messy process but it's that messiness that makes me
different than anyone else. It makes my recipes different than
anyone else is. But those differences are really small.
Even though it takes a whole 67 cabinets to write out my entire genome
it only takes about this much, 210 pages double sided, to print out the things
that make me genetically unique. If these are all recipes then this is my special
spice. Okay so maybe by now you get the basic idea of inheritance but genetics
still seems very complicated. So in order to make it as simple as a piece of cake
I'm going to make a piece of cake with a recipe that is 418 steps. If you've ever
looked for cake recipes online you probably had to sift through a bunch of
other stuff, there's ads, a review, comments, notes, and buried in there
somewhere is the actual recipe. Our genes are a lot like that. Most of them are
actually junk and just a fraction are important instructions. But, our cake
recipe doesn't look like that, it looks like this.
The first thing you'll probably notice about this recipe is that it's only
written with four letters: A, U, C, and G. I wrote it that way because our genetic
code is also made of just four letters so here's how I fit 20 different
ingredients and 20 different measurements into those four letters. To
make this cake you read the recipe three letters at a time. Those three letters
match up with an instruction of what to do. The very first step in this recipe is
AUG. That tells me that I'm going to mix each of the following ingredients
one scoop from each. So I'm gonna cross off AUG. The second step in my recipe is
ACA, so that means I'm gonna take one scoop of soy milk. This is gonna take a
while. the third is CUA, that's all-purpose
flour. The fourth is CCG: whole wheat flour,
one scoop. AGA is white sugar. UUU: that's red wine vinegar. UUA that's
all-purpose flour, again. Brown sugar. Flour. White sugar. White sugar. Water.
Almond milk, and so on. Some of the ingredients have one code on them like
almond extract is CAU. Whereas, some of them have multiple codes on them like
vanilla extract can be GAA or GAG. But what's important is that, yes there's
redundancy, but if I see the letters GAA, that could only be vanilla extract, and
same with GAG it will only be vanilla extract. It doesn't relate to anything
else. As you can probably imagine it took me a long time to do all 418 steps, but
what's crazy is that that process is actually taking place in every single
one of your cells right now, except that instead of making cakes they're making
proteins, because remember THE CAKE IS A LIE. And your cells are actually going
through those steps way faster than I can do, they read about 20 steps every
single second. So they would go through this 418 step recipe in 21 seconds. Now
to compare, it took me two hours and that's not including baking the cake so
that's 340 times faster than I can do. I'm so
looking forward to not scooping anymore of the flour.... ooh look more flour.
UUA oh my god oh man, we did it! we did it!
Eventually I get to UAA and that tells me that I can finally stop mixing
the ingredients together and I can bake the cake. Bake the cake!
Good luck little buddy.
It looks like cake! Huh.
It's good cake! I did it!
It's actually really good. Its moist, but like in a good way. We go
from a pile of goop to a cake. This is cake! It's different than before because
it has emergent properties. There's things like baking soda, and vinegar, and
lemon juice, and those interact to change it so that it's no longer pile of goop
but - An actually pretty- I gotta say, it's pretty tasty - cake. Proteins also
have emergent properties and that's why we aren't just a pile of goop, but we're
a good cake. Metaphorically speaking. If you like this video, give it the thumbs up! And
also go and check out the video I made on how the eye evolved. I demonstrate it
by building a digital camera, and I think if you're into this kind of thing then
you'll be into that so please check it out. I'm making big metaphor videos
once a month on this channel The Scope of Science, so you can subscribe for that
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