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What you are and what happens to you interact in complex ways.

In order to make you, and I mean you specifically, we need your DNA, every last thing that has happened to you, and all your cells that have come and gone during all that time.

Here’s the article I mention in the episode:

Hubel, D. H., and Wiesel, T. N.: The period of susceptibility to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kittens

That study was about kittens with one eye closed, and mostly about searching for the critical period of sight development. An earlier paper by the same authors studied the difference in the brains of cats reared with one eye, verses two eyes kept shut.

Comparison of the effects of unilateral and bilateral eye closure In cortical responses in kittens.

And you may as well have Wikipedia’s take on epigenetics.

And I’ll end with a quote from the study on kittens.

”
In considering the possible implications of studies like the present one for human development it is important to stress that in the cat, within the critical period between the fourth and eighth weeks, a deprivation as brief as a few days can have marked effects. This implies that for normal development normal environmental conditions must prevail throughout the critical period and not just during some small part of it.
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Next time, space plants.