As we committed to providing you with the most exciting news and discussions from all over the globe, we translated this brilliant scientific video into English. Hence, you know what to answer to conspiracy lovers.
Alexander Panchin is a bioinformaticist, candidate of biological sciences, fights against anti-scientific myths, and people who spread them through the lectures published on youtube. It’s called “Scientists against the myths.” For this lecture, he’d collected the six most common myths addressed by youtube watchers, and explained each of them in front of the audience.
Myth 1: Previous woman’s sexual partners (especially the first one) can impact how her first child will look.
The myth started with quite a scientific insight by Charles Darwin. He noted that when a female horse and male zebra gave the offspring, it was a hybrid. But after the same female horse got a new offspring with a usual male horse, it still had some faded stripes. This led to the conclusion that former partners can impact future generations.
Another theory that was supposed to explain it suggested it was atavism. For example, when a baby is born with a tiny tail, no one suspects his mother’s partner to be an animal.
Different experiments on animals didn’t prove the theory. Later, it was solved when scientists found out that every baby gets half of DNA from a mother and half from a father. This means that other partners couldn’t anyhow impact the DNA.
But why is this myth is still popular among some societies, especially religious ones? Because it’s used as a source of fear to motivate young mates to stay virgins and have only one life partner.
If the myth were true, that would be very simple to “create” the child you want. All a woman needs to do is have sex with relevant partners, handsome and smart first. And then happily marry any ordinary guy and still give birth to a bright and beautiful baby from him.
Myth 2: Swearing and rude wording ruin DNA.
Some researchers think that electromagnetic waves can impact DNA, as well as any words said by a person, will change negatively or positively their DNA. But if that were true, we could improve our DNA in the way we want quickly; why would genetic scientists do research instead of saying needed words in front of the DNA to modify it?
Myth 3: Drugs and promiscuous sex lead to AIDS.
This idea is still strong in countries where AIDS awareness is quite low. The root of this myth was one of the first observations when we knew nothing about the disease. The inspection was that people who usually get AIDS are homosexual men. But the statement itself is outdated, and it’s not relevant nowadays. Today, 50% of those who are positive for AIDS got infected from heterosexual partners. Don’t get us wrong, we don’t encourage you to do drugs and unprotected sex, but it’s more complicated than that.
