This is an I-Hart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

What does it mean to decode DNA?

And having done it, what can you really say?

Is DNA coding for innate behaviors more like a blueprint or a recipe?

How does DNA result in a web by a spider or honey from a bee?

Can instincts be transferred and how do we know?

Could gene manipulation give me a rooster's crow?

Whatever questions keep you up at night,

Daniel and Kelly's answers will make it all right.

Welcome to another listener questions episode

of Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.

This is episode number 35,

featuring Dr. Ben Debevore.

Thank you. featuring Dr. Ben Debevor. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I'm not a biologist.

Hello, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I am a biologist, but I am not

a geneticist, and I did kind of try to avoid genetics a little bit when I was in grad school.

Why is that? To me, genetics has so much mathematical underpinnings. It's like maybe the

mathiest part of biology. Oh, wait,

am I answering my own question? I am insulted. I, so I actually, I went into ecology because

I loved that it had math. Right, differential equations, yeah. That's right. That's right. And what,

you know, I was taking a stochastic differential

...