Ten years ago, humanity discovered a way to completely rid the world of malaria. To date this technology has gone unused, sentencing millions of child

The ultra-selfish gene

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2024-09-05 00:30:04

Ten years ago, humanity discovered a way to completely rid the world of malaria. To date this technology has gone unused, sentencing millions of children to an early and preventable death.

Almost every cell in our bodies contains 23 pairs of chromosomes, which are packages of the DNA and genes that provide the code for producing living things. Sperm and egg cells, however, each contain only one set of chromosomes. This set of chromosomes has been recombined from their parents’ chromosomes, meaning it contains a random mixture of segments from the parents. When a sperm and egg cell fuse, the resulting cell has a pair of each chromosome once again, resulting in 23 pairs.

Because the sections of each chromosome to be passed on were selected randomly, any specific gene in a parent has only a 50 percent chance of making it to the next generation.

A gene that helps organisms to have more surviving offspring will gradually become more widespread in the population. But some genes have found ways of overriding this process. For example, what if a gene makes the sperm or egg more likely to inherit the section of DNA where the gene itself is located? In that case, the selection process is no longer random, and the gene can spread across the population even if the gene carries no advantage to the animal’s fitness.