Gene for Coolness Discovered

The relative roles of heredity and the environment in determining a person’s coolness have, for many decades, been the subject of heated debate in the scientific community, newspaper columns, television panel shows and talk-back radio. The discovery of the gene for coolness, KEWL, was published in the latest issue of the prestigious medical journal Nurture Genetics and has conclusively settled the argument in favour of genetics.

In the largest study of its kind, scientists from the University of Southern Australia tested DNA from 1,670 people aged 18 to 25 years. The study subjects also completed a questionnaire that measured their coolness by asking about likes and dislikes on a range of topics covering music, fashion, recreation and popular culture. The scientists discovered that a variation in the KEWL gene, the Q17 variant, is responsible for coolness and no amount of being a slave to fashion or just hanging out at the ‘right’ places will make an uncool person become cool.

We all have two copies of every gene, one is inherited from our mother and the other from our father. Coolness is recessively inherited which means that you need to have two copies of the Q17 variant to be cool. People with one or two normal copies of the KEWL gene are not cool. This explains why a cool child can have uncool parents. Uncool parents who both have one copy of the Q17 variant have a one in four chance of having a cool child. If both parents are cool then all of their children will be cool.

The head of the research group, Dr Dexter Poin, said that a test for the Q17 variant would be available in late 2006, and added, “We expect that many people will be interested in this genetic testing. All prospective parents want their children to be cool and this will help them both in the choice of partner and as a pre-natal test.” Dr Poin has tested all of the staff who worked on the research with him but only found one cool person who had two copies of the Q17 variant. “We hoped to find that more of our 70 staff would be cool but the only one was a lab assistant who has since left to compete in the World Cup Skateboarding pro tour,” he said.

Analysis of the information collected on the questionnaire showed that musical tastes were the best way to predict who was more likely to have two copies of the Q17 variant. Dr Poin explained that, “We were expecting that fans of all dance music would be cool but this was not the case. None of the hip hop fans we studied were cool but almost all of the techno and house music fans were. Not surprisingly, there were no cool fans of country & western and death metal music.” Dr Poin also said that there was an unexpected result on the topic of pet ownership, “One of our most interesting findings was that people who owned dogs were 100 times more likely to be cool than people who owned more exotic pets like snakes.

[Editor's Note: It was also discovered that an increasing level of education did not result in "extra" cool, rather the opposite.]

 

 Who decides who's cool and who's not? Think for your self and enjoy life the way you are and not the way someone tells you are the right way.

RexRegis, March 20, 2006 7:05

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