Besides magnetism, there’s another thing that the Insane Clown Posse was on-track in categorizing as a mind-blowing mystery — Why do Shaggy 2 Dope’s kids look just like him? As with the magnets, this is another situation where the obvious answer (it’s genetics!) masks a much more complicated issue that science hasn’t totally figured out yet. At Pacific Standard, Michael White explains why genetics is still messing with our heads, almost 150 years after Mendel:
The problem: most of the genetic differences discovered have only a very small effect. And when you add up all those effects, the result can’t possibly explain the full influence of our genes on those traits. For example, researchers have identified hundreds of DNA differences between people that influence the very strongly heritable trait of human height, but the total effect of those differences added together explains only about 10 percent of the genetic influence on height. In other words, we still can’t explain why tall parents have tall children.
Scientists have named this discrepancy the “missing heritability,” and they’ve spent the last half-decade trying to find it.