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Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker Newsseems like a neat premise for a sci fi novella.
queue rationalist fathers microdosing nicotine patches before conception to give their kids the best chance at abusing drugs.
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.
For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
I was taken aback to learn my dad did the exact same thing at my age!
Current criteria appear to be motility, morphology, and DNA attributes (fragmentation & integrity) [1], all mostly visual or physical assessments.
Just a guess. I'm not a biologist.
It’s interesting to think this information being passed is something like “Heads up. This dude does a lot of exercise which means it must be crucial to survival wherever we are.”
Prior to them, I didnt think that behaviour or traits are inheritable.
When one of them was aronud 3 or 3.5, I observed an interesting behaviour: It was about the meal, which contained fries - and ketchup. He saw that the ketchup was flowing slowly towards the fries and reached there finally - he became funnily hectict, trying to prevent even more ketchup touching the fries.
Today I think he behaved that way ... because ... on my plate which fries & ketchup ... if this happens ... then ... you know :-D :-D :-D :-D It drives me nuts, really - if I am at a restaurant, I ask always for separte plates for things which are fried, because I love the crust and it gets destroyed if any type of gravy is scattered around the plate :-D
Or maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-D
But what I can clearly see, is: In their body shape I can see that their mother and I were super-fit-in-shape when they were "created".
Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
I write this here because science does not really work well when it is based on speculation. So this article is weird. It starts by speculating about something rather than analyse the article. It then continues to "textbooks have to be rewritten". Well, I think if you are in science, you need to demonstrate that all your claims made need to be correct - and others can verify it, without any restriction whatsoever.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,” Conine said.
So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
See this article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258
It was later redacted - a total fabrication. A lie.
okay, I trust this article and source more
where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
While I don’t recall the details there was an example of how starvation (of eventual parents) during WW II impacted the children. There is also, a similar example of how the effects of diet was passed along during The Great Depression.
They like to tell people that if you don’t believe their theory, then you don’t believe science.
For such a long time they made fun of Lamarckian ideas as totally discredited, then once in a while stuff like this gets published and the scientists quoted say “we still don’t know how” it happens. Yeah but the orthodoxy is sure it can’t happen in any way than their theories say.
“Epigenetics” has become a socially safe word to acknowledge that “random” mutation and natural selection doesn’t explain everything. (That word “natural” is doing a lot of work there, by the way.)
The biggest thing is conflating all the theories under “evolution” as a catch-all term. The theory of common descent has a lot of evidence (like the phylogenic tree matching radiocarbon dating) so “evolution fans” latch on to that to literally shame anyone for eg questioning that ALL speciation happens by random mutation and natural selection. Regardless of any mathematical arguments, irreducibility arguments etc.
They’re like the bitcoin maxis of science.
They love to embrace “just-so” stories with no proof, as long as the story plausibly explains how a particular feature or phenomenon came about while sticking to ONLY random mutation and natural selection, they favor it.
Some of them even go so far as to say that ABIOGENESIS is happening on other planets and just throw a ton of time and planets at the problem. Keep in mind that EVOLUTION as they themselves define it requires reproduction, and thus cannot explain abiogenesis in principle. Besides this, the Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest replicating cell that can randomly mutate and reproduce for natural selection is astronomically high. But no matter. They will postulate proimordial soups with buckyballs, RNA world theories, etc. Just throw enough time and planets at it.
And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the anthropic principle and postulate a multiverse with as many worlds as we need to explain fine-tuning of the universe! So things are the way they are because we are here to observe them. If a Richard Dawkins can’t overcome a mathematical objections their with enough planets, a fellow atheist Larry Krauss can help him out with any number of multiverses, the mindset is the same.
This is not science, people. This is a mindset. It would rather uncritically propagate “just-so” storiess with zero evidence for them, than look for actual alternative explanations. “It’s the best we can do”, they always say.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t weaponize this approach for decades to drive people out of academia or make sure they don’t get published if they question the orthodoxy.
PS: While the critique above says NOTHING about intelligent design, proponents of some kind of intelligent design have faced a frustrating sleight of hand for years. While they were derided for having a “god of the gaps” for their bias, a different bias went entirely unnoticed on the other side with the word “natural” in natural selection:
Any newly discovered mechanism can be absorbed retroactively as “natural”
But design-like explanations are excluded even if they would explain the data more compactly
This is not because they were tested and failed, but because they violate the methodological rule.
So the theory becomes:
“Whatever happened, happened naturally — and we define ‘natural’ as whatever happened.”
That makes the term unfalsifiable in principle
IOW, a Large Life Model?
The Bible clearly articulates some form of generational “pass-through” for the sins of the father passing to the children.
While I do think it largely refers to a spiritual judgement, it’s hard to ignore the real-world examples of abuse that always seem to repeat themselves without a huge effort on the part of, someone, usually the child after they’ve grown up, to break the cycle.
Source: I’ve seen a lot of brokenness in our country’s foster system.