Moon genes

We know life on Earth wouldn't be possible without the moon. Now scientists are finding the moon might even be influencing our biology on a molecular level. Guest: Rebecca Boyle, science journalist and author of Our Moon: How Earth's celestial companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are For show transcripts, go to vox.com/unxtranscripts For more, go to vox.com/unexplainable And please email us! [email protected] We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: vox.com/members Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 0:37Speaker 01

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• 1:24Speaker 02

  Science journalist Rebecca Boyle says her life revolves around the moon.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  I think about it more than most people.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  Her award-winning work has been featured in Nature, Science, The Atlantic, The New York Times, talking to astrophysicists and astronomers from around the world. Rebecca's thought so much about the moon that sometimes she gets a little protective.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  I've always loved the moon, so I kind of feel partial to it and like defensive about it.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Who's dissing on the moon?

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Well, you'd be surprised. Astronomers are like, oh, it's like so bright. Like, it can be really frustrating for people who study deep sky objects, which is like most astrophysicists.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  And so they like diss the moon sometimes, and I'm always like, but no, the moon is like really cool.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  It's the near sky object.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  It's the nearest, it's the nearest thing, and it's the most important thing, really.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  I've been following her writing on the moon for a long time. I've interviewed her on this show before, Noam Too. She's kind of our go-to moon expert for Unexplainable.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  So I was excited when her first full-length book came out just last year. It lays out her big thesis, that the moon made us who we are.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  My book is a story about the shared history between humanity and the moon. I think there's a lot that we still don't actually understand about that relationship. And the more I learned about how many questions we still have about the moon, that made me think about what else we don't know about it and its connection to us. Like, there probably is a literally molecular connection to the moon inside all life on Earth. The moon is so much of a stabilizing force on this planet in so many ways. It's responsible for more than half of the mixing of the entire ocean through the tide.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  You know, if life originated in the deep ocean, which is the sort of more prevailing modern theory, the moon probably dredged it up and maybe exposed life to the sun for the first time.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Basically, life as we know it would not be possible without the moon.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  I definitely don't think so.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  This is Unexplainable. I'm Meredith Hoddinott. And for today's Unexplainable Book Club, we launch into Rebecca Boyle's book, Our Moon, where she explores the ways the moon continues to shape our world.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Like, the moon doesn't get any credit for that, usually.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  The moon does not orbit the Earth. Part of what I learned in Rebecca's book is that both Earth and moon actually circle each other. They share a center of gravity. It's closer to the Earth because the Earth is way bigger, but together they spin through space, two parts of the same whole.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  That intimate relationship extends to the life on Earth, too, where the moon drives Earth's creatures on a molecular level.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  There is evidence that there are lunar genes that drive certain behaviors. And this is more obvious in marine animals, which makes sense because they rely on the tide. They really need to know what the moon phase is. And there's evidence that they have a genetic mechanism to do that.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Wow. So what are some of the coolest examples that you came across in your research of creatures in the ocean responding to the moon?

• 5:22Speaker 03

  One of my favorite ones is coral. You know, almost every species of coral responds to moonlight, at least to the lunar cycle. And, you know, moonlight probably is the primary thing that they're responding to. But they don't even sense light. You know, most corals don't even have eyes. So what are they doing? Like, how are they seeing the moon?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:45Speaker 03

  And so it probably isn't quite as simple as that they're seeing it. It's probably that its gravitational presence overhead, you know, is also playing some kind of role. But when the moon is full, corals will release their sperm and eggs at the same time. Like, the scientists that study this, you know, joke about it. One of them calls it the greatest orgy on Earth. And we know that moonlight is a primary driver of that process. Like, if the moon is not visible, if it's cloudy or something, they will wait.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  So they're like waiting to sync up to make sure that they're all deploying this hopping coral orgy at the same time?

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's one of those things, again, that seems like logical when you think about it. Because how else are you going to coordinate that?

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  You know, like, corals don't travel. They're not mobile.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  They don't have wristwatches.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they don't meet up at certain places. Like, they don't have migratory patterns like other animals that mate. So you have to have some other kind of cue that you all use. And in the ocean, the moon is king.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  It makes sense that like sea creatures, obviously depending on the tide, would need to be like really dialed in to moon cycles. But what about on land? Do like plants and animals respond to the moon?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  They do, and I don't think we really understand why, especially for for plants.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  Like, why would a little seedling need to be sensitive to the moon?

• 7:14Speaker 03

  But it is, and the in the movement of leaves and the growth of roots, it they respond to lunar gravity. There is a Scottish botanist who devoted his a lot of his career to showing this connection between the moon and plant life. And before he died, he got an experiment flown on the space station where astronauts were looking at gene expression in Rabidopsis deliana, which is the model plant. It's thale cress. It's this little, little tiny, little watery plant. And it's like the white mouse of of botany. It's been thoroughly studied for decades. It's the it's the plant you look at when you want to understand gene expression generally in plants.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  And they grew them on the space station and found the same lunar cycle that they find on Earth, even when they're in space in microgravity. So that suggests that there's some gravitational influence there, that the moon's presence in the sky is somehow altering the genes of plants.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  So even when these plants weren't on Earth, they still respond to the moon's gravity?

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's some math you have to do to like, figure out where the moon is, where you are, because the space station orbits every 90 minutes. And so in his experiment, they showed that the plants changed their root movements every 45 and 90 and 135 minutes, which shows that they followed the rhythms of the moon, even when they were off-world.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Is it possible that like we as humans have the moon also written into our DNA?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  I definitely think so. And I think this is one of these things that's been dismissed for the last century or so in medicine because it's hard to prove, you know, it sounds woo, it sounds like silly or witchcraft and you know, it's it's sort of easy to dismiss.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  In part because this was thought to be the case for millennia, like for almost all of written medical history. People believe that the planets and the moon, you know, astrology played a huge role in our health. I mean, the word lunacy and lunatic comes from the moon, like lunar, and people really believed for a long time, and there probably is some truth to the fact that the moon plays this role in our our psychology. It changes how we behave and how we feel when the moon is full. There is evidence that people who have bipolar disorder experience heightened episodes of mania during full moons. So like lunatic asylum, like it's not, it's not,

• 9:58Speaker 03

  it's not crazy, you know. There probably is something going on there. And, you know, the the issue is that people are complicated, society is complicated, and we can't really blame behaviors or activities on like one thing. And so it is simplistic to say the moon is like great, you know, driving people wild or whatever.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  But there's interesting correlations in various fields of human health and, you know, physiology and in psychology, mental health and physical health. There's this possible connection that the full moon can increase the number of people having hemorrhages or undergoing a stroke or heart attack.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  What?

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, it's very thorny. But again, like, we don't know if it's some, it has a gravitational influence and that's if that's the case, like, how are we responding to that? Is there some physical change in the flow of our blood? Maybe looking at what happens to plants, that's not impossible.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Like, almost like a tide in in our blood, in our veins?

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 11:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. Is there a blood tide, you know? I mean, I don't know. And this, again, would be really difficult to study in a meaningful way, but like, it's there's something, there's some cue that people seem to be responding to.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  After the break, why you might have felt a little different under the full moon last weekend.

• 11:40Noam Hassenfeld?

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• 11:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  All right, one of life's great mysteries. You're listening to music in the living room. You gotta grab something from the kitchen. You don't want to take the speaker with you, but you also don't want to miss that beat drop. And this is where I introduce you to the magic of Sonos. Sonos sent me a couple of speakers to try out, so I've got to move two here in the living room. And then I walk down the hall.

• 12:11Noam Hassenfeld?

  I get in here to the kitchen, and I got a brand new Sonos Play right here on the counter. I can open the fridge, grab a seltzer.

• 12:29Noam Hassenfeld?

  And yeah, I didn't miss a second. And I can make each speaker louder or softer in the Sonos app, or if I'm using AirPlay, so I can make it louder in the kitchen without blasting whoever is still in the living room. It's all just easy, and it sounds amazing. These speakers are crisp. They've got great bass. And I'm especially impressed with the new Sonos Play. It packs this truly awesome sound in a much smaller size. So I don't know, if I want to

• 13:02Noam Hassenfeld?

  head outside for a minute. It's super easy. And yeah, pretty nice out. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos, love the sound, feel the system.

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• 14:45Speaker 01

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• 15:38Speaker 02

  Is the moon influencing our bodies, our biology? According to science writer and moon defender Rebecca Boyle, some of the most interesting research she's seen is from scientists actually trying to disprove the moon's effects. Like this 2021 paper from a German biologist, looking into the connection between the moon and fertility.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  She set out to disprove this.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 16:09Speaker 03

  She was like, I don't think this is real. I think that, you know, we should be able to show, looking at records, that there's not really a strong enough connection between lunar cycles and human menstruation. So she went through people who had used an app and also taken diary entries. The oldest record was like 42 years or something. Like it was a person's entire life.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Like their entire fertile life. And she went back and overlaid that on lunar cycles. And it was such a strong correlation that she was like, oh, I think that's a real thing. And this was published in Science Advances, pretty well regarded and I think super interesting. The main like qualms people had with this study was that it wasn't a large population. So it was like a few dozen people. So it's not a population level statistic.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  But there are population level studies that have looked at reproductive health. And in all those studies, the length of an average human menstrual cycle is the same as a lunar cycle.

• 17:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 03

  And like, there are people, of course, on both ends of that spectrum. There are people with much shorter menstrual cycles, people with much longer ones, and those are all considered normal and healthy. Like, there's not a right or wrong number.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  But if you look at the statistical averages of people over long periods of time that are tracking these things, the numbers are the same. Like, it's 29 and a half days, and that's the length of a lunar cycle. And like, that could totally be a coincidence.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Or not. We don't know, and we're never gonna know.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  But I think it's just really worth keeping it in mind, that like, there probably is some really profound ancestral connection.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  That we have on like a literally molecular basis to the presence of the moon.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. One thing that we haven't touched on yet is is sleep and how the moon or the moon phases might influence sleep. Is that something you came across in your research?

• 18:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's one of the more profound effects. Probably that impact, like the effect on sleep is one of the things that drives these like knock on effects. So yeah, sleep probably is one of the things that has a dramatic effect on our entire physiology. And so any changes in sleep are going to have effects on mental health and physical health, stress, like your gut, your microbiome, all these things cascade from like, you know, disruption to sleep. And we know for a fact the moon does disrupt sleep. There was a study looking at grad students in Seattle, measuring their sleep.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Sleepless in Seattle?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  You know, but it was a really interesting study and it showed like people living in dorms, even there's lots of artificial light at night, still had their sleep affected by the moon. Like sleep decreases by several minutes on full moon nights. And my favorite study about this went into a sleep lab. This was another scientist who was like, this sounds fishy to me. Like, I don't think this is real. I'm gonna rule it out.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  And ran a study in a sleep lab, so windowless basement lab. And the participants were not told the real purpose of the study. They were told it was something else. And again, it was like a very profound change in the number of minutes of sleep and the length of their REM cycles, the quality of their sleep. All these things showed this pretty dramatic change from dark moon cycles to when the moon was full. But the fact that even if you can't see it, this is happening is sort of weird. And like, there's gotta be some gravitational force at play here too. Because the people didn't even see the moon. Like, how are they gonna know?

• 20:04Speaker 02

  Right. It's not like it's like shining in through their window or something disrupting their sleep.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Right.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what are, what are some of the next steps in pursuing this journey? Like, what are scientists still trying to figure out about the relationship of the moon in our bodies?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  I think, you know, doing more studies like the ones on marine organisms to understand better this circular lunar rhythm and isolate the genes that might be responsible for that because we're not sure yet what they are. And on like just a, you know, a broader level, I think just trying to understand what made Earth, Earth and what made us who we are is sort of the goal. And if we can come to understand the influences that played a role in our evolution in the, you know, distant past, that's valuable just for our own knowledge and to understand better who we are and how we got here.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  And I think the moon plays a role in that story that has not been told very much.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Especially in modern medical science and health science and just even how to frame those questions.

• 21:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. What makes it so hard to study the moon's impact on our bodies?

• 21:21Speaker 03

  I mean, it's almost impossible to separate it from any other signal or pressure that you would be looking at. You know, you can't, you can't knock out people's genes to, to see like, would this change this?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  You can't do like controlled studies, but you can do population level studies. You can do retrospective studies and there's, there's been a lot of that. But, you know, it's also really hard to like divorce human health from other things that mess us up, like our diet and air quality and

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:50Speaker 03

  artificial light at night affecting our circadian rhythms. You know, like there's so many confounding factors that it makes it really difficult. And I mean, any epidemiology is hard for that reason, but that doesn't mean it's not real.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  And that's the thing, I, I don't think when people think about, you know, overall health and, and environmental effects on health, that they're thinking about the moon.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Right. Right.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  But maybe, maybe they should. Maybe there's something going on there that we should think about.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  And why, why do you think it's important to better understand the role of the moon in our lives? Or like appreciate that relationship?

• 22:29Speaker 03

  I mean, it's one of the primary features of Earth. And I don't think it's really thought about in that way, but it's as much a part of Earth as the ocean and the atmosphere and plate tectonics, you know, the things that make Earth what it is. And I think we need to really consider that. When we think about the origins of this planet and the origins of life on this planet and how we all live on this planet, but also just in terms of the moon. Like, it doesn't really warrant a lot of attention from us in modern life. Like, once we went there, you know, and walked on it. Been there, done that. Yeah, it was like, cool. You know, we did that. Some, some white dudes flounced around for a while and like came home with rocks and like, cool.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  And like, I love Apollo. You know, I think that's, it's the pinnacle of human achievement. Like, I will never diss the Apollo missions. But to me, they were sort of lacking something, which was, that's, that's not all there is. The moon is, is a world. The moon is a place that is very special and, and unique. There's no other place like it in our solar system or anywhere else we've ever looked. And that has to mean something. We need to keep in mind what the moon actually is and what it represents to us and what we owe it. What do we owe the moon now, after all this history and all the things it's done for life on Earth?

• 24:02Speaker 03

  But I see it sometimes in my window and it's full. I'm like, I hope I did right by you, moon. I hope people care a little more now. That's the most success I can imagine for this book. It's like, if it makes people think about the moon in a different way and appreciate it in a different way, then I have done my job. This one's for you, moon. Exactly.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  You can learn more about this and so much more about the moon in Rebecca Boyle's book, "Our Moon: How Earth's Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are." This episode was produced by me, Meredith Hodnot. I also run the show. We had editing from Julia Longoria with help from Jorge Just, mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala, music from Noam Hassenfeld, production support from Thomas Lu and Mandy Nguyen, and fact checking from Melissa Hirsch.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Byrd Pinkerton bent over to read the note when the floor started to shake, and then a sudden crash. The ceiling had collapsed in around her, but the control panel and the note hadn't been touched.

• 25:29Speaker 02

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• 26:46Noam Hassenfeld?

  Support for the show comes from Sonos. No matter how much you know about frequency response or harmonic distortion, the thing that's going to make you fall in love with a speaker is how it makes you feel. And Sonos has that it factor, you know? It's this seamless system that makes things sound good in every room. That obviously takes some serious engineering, but it also takes a big-picture understanding of how and why we actually listen to things. The birthday playlist, the new TV show, the exciting new game you just got. And for the nerds out there, Sonos does have amazing frequency response and extremely low harmonic distortion. Visit sonos.com and build your system. Sonos: Love the sound, feel the system.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest-growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as 2.5 minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.