[HN Gopher] Violence alters human genes for generations, researc...
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Violence alters human genes for generations, researchers discover
Author : gudzpoz
Score : 421 points
Date : 2025-02-28 15:33 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (news.ufl.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.ufl.edu)
| stanleykm wrote:
| > The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into
| future generations should help people be more empathetic, help
| policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
|
| This seems like a pretty charitable read on policymakers. We
| inflict violence all the time that has multigenerational
| downstream effects without a genetic component and we don't
| really care about the human cost, why would adding a genetic
| component change anything?
| dleeftink wrote:
| Maybe the only way to get out of a cycle is, trying to get out
| of the cycle?
| stanleykm wrote:
| Sure but I think if an appeal to empathy was going to work
| we'd already have seen it work.
| haswell wrote:
| Progress if often gradual and the result of continuous
| pressure over long periods of time. Not everyone will
| respond to an appeal to empathy, but I don't think "we'd
| have already seen it work" is a framing that makes sense.
| weard_beard wrote:
| Is it even desirable to avoid something nature selected
| for? The biggest assumption here is that these epigenetic
| mutations aren't desirable for survival in a chaotic and
| violent world
| EMIRELADERO wrote:
| It's only undesirable under the assumption that a chaotic
| and violent world is an acceptable state of affairs.
| weard_beard wrote:
| I could swallow that argument but in isolation this feels
| like using the abused as lab rats so we can more
| thoroughly destroy them at some future date
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Progress is completely random and arbitrary. Sometimes it
| zooms forward, other times it regresses. The universe has
| no mystical rules that demand that it continue.
|
| >Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy
|
| I don't even think we use the word "empathy" correctly.
| It makes sense to me when we're talking about a non-
| general empathy, where you see a particular person close
| to you (physically, if not emotionally) and you _feel_
| for them. You can 't have empathy with some abstract
| hypothetical. You can't even have empathy for some large
| loosely defined group of people of the non-hypothetical
| sort. And, most of all, it's largely spontaneous. If you
| go into it having already decided you feel empathy for
| them "just on principle", then what you're feeling isn't
| empathy. It's performative. It's virtue signaling.
| Pretending that is empathy does empathy no favors, and it
| does no favors to the people who are supposedly being
| empathized with. Because it is performative, it's always
| just this thin veneer of compassion over an inadequately
| hidden contempt. Worse still may be those who lie to
| themselves so successfully that they believe that it's
| real empathy, the hatred is buried deeper but festers all
| the more for it.
|
| Appeal to pragmatism instead of empathy. You can make
| rational arguments if you're trying to be pragmatic.
| Appeal to justice. Appeal to anything but empathy. When I
| hear the word "empathy", I know that I'm about to have a
| load of horseshit dumped on me. You all know it too, even
| if you're worried that other people will shun you if you
| admit it out loud.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Would you accept the argument that someone who for
| whatever reason doesn't have empathy would also not be
| able to recognize it? For example, watching someone cry
| over current events would be unrecognizable to a
| sociopathic person. They may even accuse the person of
| lying or putting on a performance. Could you also accept
| the possibility that even if such a person _could_
| recognize empathy, they still lack or block the capacity
| to feel the empathy, and therefore the only use the
| recognition has is in manipulation (use it to corroborate
| a point, or use it to spread an attack, or just fuck it,
| just use it for anything since you can 't actually feel
| it). You don't have to actually do anything with empathy,
| you can literally just sit there and cry. If you think
| empathy has a _use_ first and foremost, then sure, I can
| see why you think someone is _using_ it in a performance.
| You see, some of us cry because it hurts us.
|
| To get a better understanding, let's use something very
| analogous - Cringe. When we watch someone do something
| cringe, we feel it. The same is true for empathy you see,
| that's what it is. We feel someone else's pain.
| Psychologists say those that don't feel it are
| sociopaths.
|
| "Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so
| successfully that they believe that it's real empathy"
|
| Again, you have difficulty identifying real or not real
| empathy. This is not a problem for people that were
| raised without confusion. You can just say I'm from
| environments where I couldn't figure out if anyone cared
| about me or not (common). Is there a universe where you
| can accept this diagnosis or are you pure? We are all a
| constant work in progress.
|
| The gene expression of apathy needs to be studied as
| well.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Would you accept the argument that someone who for
| whatever reason doesn't have empathy would also not be
| able to recognize it?
|
| I don't bake cakes, so I of course can't recognize a
| cake. Everyone knows this. Magical thinking demands that
| it be true. You have an immaterial soul that connects you
| to the universe, Jeebus, and the ghost of Elvis Presley.
|
| >watching someone cry over current events would be
| unrecognizable to a sociopathic person. They may even
| accuse the person of lying or putting on a performance.
|
| Sure, they might do that if they _were_ lying. Which in
| many cases they are. So much of the real world around you
| is inexplicable, isn 't it? There are these secret
| sociopaths all around you, they look just like anyone
| else _and they 're all serial killers waiting to Hannibal
| Lecter you!_
|
| Or maybe, everyone's like this, but some large fraction
| of the population is engaged in this weird cultural
| phenomenon where you all compete to appear more virtuous
| to each other than you really are. But admitting it would
| just ruin the fun, eh? And what if you admit it, and then
| everyone else doubles down and insists it was real for
| them, outting you as the serial killer? Can't have that.
|
| Empathy is only possible for people within your Dunbar
| number. Everyone beyond that only requires and only gets
| whatever civility is merited for diplomatic purposes. In
| your way of thinking, these so-called sociopaths... every
| single human is one. At least to the other 8 billion
| people who don't happen to be in their Dunbar circle.
| This explains how the cops can be so callous to the
| wrongly accused and to the victims alike. How soldiers
| are so quick to run off and commit war crimes (with or
| without sanctioning by superiors). Why those
| schoolteachers abuse the little kindergarten kids. And on
| and on and on. To you it's mysterious. Invisible monsters
| out there ready to pounce and eat you. It's why you can't
| fix any of this, why all those problems seem to grow out
| of control. Too busy trying to get everyone to pretend
| they have empathy which they don't.
|
| >We feel someone else's pain.
|
| You pretend you feel it. You don't. This isn't Star Trek,
| you don't have telepathy. This isn't Harry Potter, you
| don't have magic. But again, people will look at you
| weird if you admit you can't.
|
| >Again, you have difficulty identifying real or not real
| empathy.
|
| I don't at all. I have a superior talent for recognizing
| it. As in, you have no ability to recognize it, no
| potential to develop such a skill, and can't even think
| about it rationally enough to appreciate your
| shortcomings.
|
| >You can just say I'm from environments where I couldn't
| figure out if anyone cared about me
|
| "Please humiliate yourself so I can go back to competing
| in the Virtue Signaling World Championships! Your mama
| didn't love you nyah nyah nyah!"
|
| Except she did. And I've had a few people in my life over
| the years who did care about me. I'd say instead it's
| people like yourself who have the confusion. Constantly
| complaining about narcissists that you somehow don't see
| coming a mile away. Constantly begging for updoots on
| reddit, your entire generation, for whining about how you
| might have to go no contact with your parents because
| they won't acknowledge your new puppy as just as
| important as their actual grandchildren. Hell, the most
| extreme of your sort have invented entire new crackpot
| pseudo-religions where you're not allowed to eat food
| because you're supposed to have empathy for it.
|
| >Is there a universe where you can accept this diagnosis
| or are you pure?
|
| Are you a licensed psychiatrist? Please private message
| me about the state you are licensed in, and which
| business name you practice under. I will accept your
| diagnosis if I have these details.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| Edit:
|
| Okay, I understand you. You are wrong, but that is the
| nature of expression when it comes to agitation and
| anger. It's not necessarily your entire being, but such
| forces can co-opt a person for quite some time. Some
| people get addicted to indulging in righteous indignation
| (which somewhat corroborates your point about
| performance, but I'll amend the point to include that
| it's happening to extremes on both sides. You yourself
| have wholesale invalidated the emotions of the other
| side, possibly reciprocally).
|
| Sometimes just acting like _something_ becomes you. So
| there is your mindfuck. You ever had to fake it a bit
| until you caught your rhythm? It's in us to truly feel,
| just try.
|
| Experiment:
|
| https://youtube.com/shorts/j4TVuoicPrY
|
| Watch that after taking a deep breath and calmly try to
| tell yourself that _"this is a woman who is probably more
| emotional than me, and I have seen women cry before over
| a lot of things. She is also of Hispanic origin and may
| have additional emotions here. She is also American and
| is a beneficiary of the labor of these people. I have to
| try to believe these are real emotions, even though even
| though my entire being is telling me she is a liar"._
|
| You have to fucking try.
|
| If you walk out with "I still think it's performative",
| then FINE. At least you tried, we're all still here
| talking to you right?
|
| I will say one thing though, you sound batshit enough for
| the two of us to become friends.
| westurner wrote:
| Because later generations shouldn't be forced pay the cost for
| such violence that they didn't perpetrate or perpetuate.
|
| To make it real when there's no compassion, loving kindness, or
| the golden rule:
|
| War reparations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_reparations
| tsunamifury wrote:
| You could argue that's the trauma expressing itself through
| derivative real experiences into the future.
| westurner wrote:
| It is the purpose of criminal and civil procedure to force
| parties that caused loss, violence, death and trauma to pay
| for their offenses.
|
| We have a court system that is supposed to abide Due
| Process so that there are costs to inflicting trauma
| (without perpetuating a vicious cycle).
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I think you may want to re-read parent. They are saying that
| the reason you gave ( all of which were provided before )
| barely restrained human kind from doing what it /was/is/will
| be doing.
| westurner wrote:
| If compassion and war reparations are insufficient to deter
| unjust violence, what will change the reinforced behaviors?
| harimau777 wrote:
| Ironically, the ability to reciprocate with violence is
| the only thing that has reliably deterred violence.
| pc86 wrote:
| This seems like the flip-side of the argument that
| eschewing violence makes you honorable only if you're
| actually capable of committing violence in the first
| place. Eschewing violence because you're incapable of
| committing it just means you're weak.
|
| If Country A knows Country B can't defend itself, it's
| natural to assume at some point A may attack B. If the
| countries are relatively equally armed and skilled in the
| use of those arms, it would take a lot more for one
| country to attack the other.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| You have to reach the children and rehabilitate them.
| This is the type of damage the children are growing up
| with (HBO documentary from 2004 which I highly recommend
| people watch, the journalist got fatally shot filming
| it):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5TRnidnk#t=30m30s
|
| Counting on your fingers the dead. This has to be a
| rehabilitation effort, because it's just no way for
| children to talk and be.
| westurner wrote:
| Family therapy > Summary of theories and techniques: http
| s://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_therapy#Summary_of_theo.
| ..
|
| Expressive therapies:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_therapies
|
| Systemic therapy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_therapy :
|
| > _Based largely on the work of anthropologists Gregory
| Bateson and Margaret Mead, this resulted in a shift
| towards what is known as "second-order cybernetics" which
| acknowledges the influence of the subjective observer in
| any study, essentially applying the principles of
| cybernetics to cybernetics - examining the examination._
|
| "What are the treatment goals?"
|
| Clean Language:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language
|
| ...
|
| In "Jack Ryan" (TV Series) Season 1 Episode 1, the
| children suffer from war trauma in their upbringing and
| that pervades their lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
| Jack_Ryan_(TV_series)#Season_1...
|
| In "Life is Beautiful" (1997) Italian children are
| trapped in war:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful
|
| Magneto from X-Men (with the helmet) > Fictional
| character biography > Early life: https://en.wikipedia.or
| g/wiki/Magneto_(Marvel_Comics)#Early_...
|
| "Chronicles of Narnia" (1939-1949) > Background and
| conception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_
| of_Narnia#Backg...
| jahewson wrote:
| War reparations gave us the Nazis, so they clearly don't
| work. And compassion has given us everything we have seen
| thus far in history so we can conclude that too is
| ineffective.
| westurner wrote:
| Reparations certainly deterred further violent fascist
| statism in post WW _II_ Germany.
|
| Unfortunately the Berlin Wall.
|
| WWI reparations were initially assessed by the Treaty of
| Versailles (1919)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations
|
| Dulles, Dawes Plan > Results:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Plan
|
| > Dawes won the 1925 Nobel Prize, WWI reparations
| obligations were reduced
|
| Then the US was lending them money and steel because it
| was so bad there, and then we learned they had been
| building tanks and bombs with our money instead of
| railroads and peaceful jobs.
|
| Business collaboration with Nazi Germany > British,
| Swiss, US, Argentinian and Canadian banks: https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...
|
| And then the free money rug was pulled out from under
| them, and then the ethnic group wouldn't sell their
| paintings to help pay the debts of the war and subsequent
| central economic mismanagement.
|
| And then they invaded various continents, overextended
| themselves when they weren't successfully managing their
| own country's economy, and the Allied powers eventually
| found the art (and gold) and dropped the bomb developed
| by various ethnic groups in the desert and that was that.
|
| Except for then WWII reparations:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_reparations
|
| The US still occupies or inhabits Germany, which is
| Russia's neighbor.
|
| Trump was $400 million in debt to Deutsche Bank AG (of
| Germany and Russia now) and had to underwrite said loan
| himself due to prior defaults. Nobody but Deutsche Bank
| would loan Trump (Trump Vodka, University,) money prior
| to 2016. Also Russian state banks like VEB, they forgot
| to mention.
|
| Business projects of Donald Trump in Russia > Timeline of
| Trump business activities related to Russia: https://en.m
| .wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_projects_of_Donald_...
|
| It looks like - despite attempted bribes of foreign heads
| of state with free apartment - there will not be a Trump
| Tower Moscow.
|
| "Biden halts Trump-ordered US troops cuts in Germany"
| (2021) https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-
| military-f...
| westurner wrote:
| > _art (and gold)_
|
| "The Monuments Men" (2014)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monuments_Men
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| Not sure that the guy who thinks "future generations
| shouldn't pay the cost for something they didn't do" is
| thinking his position when his very next thought is "we'll
| make the great-grandchildren of the warmongers pay cash to
| the great-grandchildren of the victorious warmongers".
| eurekin wrote:
| Typical policymaker: "noted, so we have confirmation for
| condemning whole generations"
| bloomingkales wrote:
| I'll quote Michael Douglas from _Traffic_ , "If there is a war
| on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I
| don't know how you wage war on your own family". His daughter
| was knee deep in heroin addiction as he was tasked to
| criminalize everyone. By the end of the movie he was changed
| imo.
|
| We have no way of giving such an experience to those in power.
| The best we can do going forward is pick more well rounded
| people, and no, that doesn't mean great schools and great
| wealth. You must be experienced in life.
| boringg wrote:
| I mean not to fan the flames of war on drugs - but its
| supposed to be targeting supply chain and large distributors
| bloomingkales wrote:
| It's a 24 year old movie. Around that time the history of
| the drug war involved a lot more petty criminalization
| (look how far we've come). This discussion can veer.
| staplers wrote:
| Law enforcement doesn't typically target itself and the
| ruling class.
| derektank wrote:
| Former Senator Bob Menendez would be very surprised to
| learn that
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Ignoring the fact that the word "typically" was highly
| operative, he's a great example of the point you're
| trying to undermine. The government never would have gone
| away empty handed with no conviction of any sort like
| they did the first time they went after Menendez in the
| late 2010s. A normal peasant would have had their life
| ruined and been just barely scraping by in the 2020s when
| he was doing the things that ultimately got him put away.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| "Typically" being the key word here. Morons exist in
| every economic class. See: Eric Adams.
|
| Anyway, Menendez has gotten off extremely lightly and
| everyone can see this.
| derektank wrote:
| I just find it odd to describe something that happens at
| the federal level on average once a year[1] as atypical.
| (And I'm sure even more frequently at the state level).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federa
| l_polit...
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Convictions seem like a distraction from the narrative
| here: Menendez fucked over his constituents. Obviously
| every politician that does so should be equally
| castigated. The court is irrelevant in this context and
| should be considered a trailing symptom.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Once a year at more than 500 lawmakers and some number of
| senior executive branch appointees is <0.2%.
| derektank wrote:
| How many lawmakers, judges, and executive appointees do
| you imagine are in the habit of committing crimes? Less
| than 250K people are convicted of crimes every year among
| the entire population. That's <0.075%
| parineum wrote:
| Even if it were just doing that (and I don't believe that's
| either the objective or the practical application, minor
| possession offenses targeting users are the vast majority
| of convictions), your street level dealer is so far down
| the chain to have no effect on supply and is a member of
| the community that you're hoping to help by imprisoning.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| GPT is floating out nearly 8 million arrests for drug
| possession in America between 1990 and 2010.
| icameron wrote:
| No, that seems far too low. I'm getting disillusioned
| with GPT answering everything.
|
| I don't find exact numbers for 1990-2010 but the number
| from 1996-2015 was over 32 million according to
| drugpolicyfacts.org [1]
|
| https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/table/total_arrests
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| A simple policy could easily end those supply chains and
| large distributors. Just legalize it. Coke, meth, heroin.
| Legalize it, only allow it to be sold retail (no more
| street drugs), only allow licensed manufacturers to produce
| it, only allow them some very modest (capped at 2% over
| cost, maybe) profits. You get to choose where it's sold
| (out of liquor stores, most likely, instead of crack
| houses). You get to starve the cartels to death (they're
| cut out completely). No cops dying in shootouts, no dealers
| dying in shootouts, no bystanders dying in shootouts. And
| if you want tweekers to stop stealing copper wiring for
| scrap, just get rid of piss tests too... if drugs are so
| awful that people who give suck dick for it, then they're
| also so awful that people will get a minimum wage job
| scrubbing toilets for them. It's just that they can't
| because of piss tests.
|
| Instead, we'll get another 100 years of half-assed
| decriminalization, where it's still illegal to sell,
| dealers are still motivated to kill cops, deadbeats, and
| rivals, where 100,000 people die because it's laced with
| fentanyl and even decriminalized illegal street drugs can't
| be regulated. I eagerly await all the downvotes this
| opinion will get.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| 100%. Decriminalizing possession only solves part of the
| problem: not ruining users lives even more than they have
| already done. Cracking down on dealers just incentives
| them to substitute stronger and more dangerous drugs in
| the pipeline.
|
| One more change I would like to see: get rid of
| advertising this stuff. Giant billboards pushing alcohol,
| tobacco, and cannabis, are bad for all of us.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| I don't think there was any moment of history where that
| was true.
|
| Besides, on a practical note, the war on drugs is what
| created large distributors. There weren't any when it
| started.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Yeah, but that "supposed to" is propaganda more than
| policy, and is quite far from a description of the
| consequences on the ground.
| meyum33 wrote:
| That was a good film. I always remembered del Toro's
| recommendation about bulling more lighted fields for kids.
| Chinese society could learn a lot about how gaming is
| actually not that addictive when you look deeper into the
| problem.
| tombert wrote:
| Getting off the rails here but I never get to talk about
| this movie!
|
| When first watching that movie, I really didn't like it
| right until the last scene, with Michael Douglas and his
| daughter in rehab, with the line "My name is Robert. And my
| wife, Barbara and I are here to support our daughter
| Caroline. And we're here to listen."
|
| It was such a simple yet clever way to end the movie and
| highlight a central theme in the movie, which is that the
| way to solve our problems isn't to demonize the people that
| caused them, but instead to _listen_ to them.
|
| It was weird, because it sort of retroactively made me
| really like the rest of the movie.
|
| I feel like I'm willing to put up with a lot of the more
| slow-paced stuff if I know it's _going somewhere_. If I
| know that this is building up to an interesting theme, then
| I don 't get bored.
|
| It's now become one of my favorite films.
| ferguess_k wrote:
| War on drugs != War on drug users.
|
| Shouldn't it be War on dug dealers?
| op00to wrote:
| That hasn't been the implementation applied in almost all
| cases.
| relistan wrote:
| It's shouldn't be a war at all. That framing is unhelpful
| to solving the actual policy and societal problems.
| rexpop wrote:
| The point of the "war" framing is to manufacture consent
| for the chronic inflammation that is patriarchal
| domination via semi-martial law.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| > the chronic inflammation that is patriarchal domination
| via semi-martial law
|
| What does this mean?
| ferguess_k wrote:
| It can be some legal actions, for sure? If it's illegal
| polices should move forward to clean them up?
| davkan wrote:
| No, patrolling your streets like you would a warzone is
| bad for everyone. It's not a war. Any allusion to it
| being a war is bad. It is policing.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Said the guy who is safely sitting 4,000 kms. away from
| where the reality of his "opinions" takes place.
| relistan wrote:
| If you have a point to make, it would help if you made
| it.
| janalsncm wrote:
| I agree, and I think the militarization of the police has
| been a net negative on the US. It should be police
| action. East Asian countries have very low drug use rates
| because they deal with drug use appropriately. Meanwhile
| in San Francisco, a comparably far richer place, drug use
| is tolerated and the problem proliferates.
|
| And you don't need armored vehicles and SWAT teams to get
| to a better place.
| nomdep wrote:
| You are changing the framing to excuse drug dealers. Most
| of the people with harsh lives don't become criminals.
| relistan wrote:
| No I am not. Who is excusing drug dealers?
|
| But, making things illegal that (clearly) people will buy
| anyway just pours billions into criminal enterprises. The
| vast majority of crime is funded by drug money in one way
| or another. The same thing happened during US
| prohibition: people did not stop drinking alcohol, but
| all the money from alcohol suddenly poured into the
| criminal economy. This is a well-trodden path and we
| should know better by now.
|
| Has "the war" worked out? We're several decades in with
| no win in sight.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The imaginary clean dichotomy between the two is one of the
| convenient fictions that serves to make the war on drugs
| semi-palatable.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| Portugal seems to legally distinguish between
| distributors and consumers just fine.
|
| Perhaps there's some weight to the idea that demonization
| of distributors harms consumers--but this doesn't seem to
| be an ideological barrier between being aware of the
| harms to users and the obvious economic boon of taking
| advantage of regulation to exploit the market advantage.
| buu700 wrote:
| It shouldn't be a war on anything. Because we insist on
| treating adults like children, we're taking money that
| would have gone to tightly regulated pharmaceutical
| corporations like Bayer[1] and funneling it into violent
| criminal syndicates.
|
| The "War on Drugs" is just a massive subsidy for the
| cartels via US markets. A sane approach to actually reduce
| drug use and fentanyl deaths would be to mirror the
| policies that have brought American tobacco use to a
| historic low and invest the tax revenue from legal narcotic
| sales into addiction treatment centers.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History
| butlike wrote:
| If you're in a violent environment, that environment will be so
| antithetical to survivability, it's prudent for your genes to
| transcript you were in a violent environment for multiple
| generations.
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > we don't really care about the human cost
|
| Humanity risks a global return to a state of gleeful cruelty.
| "Lupus est homo homini". [1]
|
| The well-being of people is a characteristic of successful
| society. And labour is fundamentally valuable. For those who
| seek economic pre-eminence, it makes perfect sense to invest in
| the people doing the work.
|
| However, there are narrow-minded groups and individuals who see
| another equation: put workers in an exploitable condition and
| keep them in such condition over generations. Wars have been
| fought to preserve the investment in maintaining such
| conditions.
|
| Labour is valuable, but the individual cost in human life is
| usually dismissed through demagogy and populism. We had broken
| the historical cycle of misery, but we now risk the
| achievements of our civilisation.
|
| [1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus
| mlhpdx wrote:
| The nature of the changes aren't well understood. It seems
| dangerous to assume that they are unhealthy, or somehow
| destructive when the opposite could just as easily be true. The
| children of those experiencing violence may be more robust in
| some ways rather than the opposite. It's an interesting
| finding, and something to be understood better, but jumping to
| the conclusion that it's a bad thing it's just dismissive of
| the robustness of humanity in general.
| clarkmoody wrote:
| Future generations aren't voting in the next election.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The actual study is about exposure to pretty extreme violence
| during pregnancy having epigenetic effects beyond one
| generation to F4. This is the first study to ever present such
| evidence in humans since some caution is warranted here with
| any conclusions.
| carbocation wrote:
| I'm perplexed by this university press release. Do they really
| not link to the underlying research article that they're
| discussing?
| riffic wrote:
| you can put the researchers names into a search engine (ask an
| academic librarian if you need help). I'm not sure if it's in
| the scope of the press release to link directly to primary
| sources.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| Yes, it is. Top universities do.
| carbocation wrote:
| To give you a better understanding of how this works, if my
| university didn't include a link to my research in the press
| release about my publication, I'd contact them to issue a
| correction. That's how fundamental it is to link to the
| research article.
| riffic wrote:
| this is a blog, not a rigorous publication with citations
| or formality.
| carbocation wrote:
| That's a misunderstanding. This is not a "blog"; this is
| a press release from a university on its newsfeed.
| Linking to their own researcher's work is not a matter of
| being "rigorous" and is unrelated (and not at all
| similar) to academic citations.
| cududa wrote:
| Is that a genuine question?
|
| You've never once seen a university press release boiled down
| for the general public, without a link to underlying research?
| randomdrake wrote:
| The original research[0] is available for free online.
|
| It goes into more detail about how they established the genetic
| signatures and has a lot more images as well.
|
| Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence
| in three generations of Syrian refugees
|
| [0] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
| yieldcrv wrote:
| I'm very interested in this branch of same-generation evolution,
| as this is one of the core components excluded from Natural
| Selection theory
|
| I'm very skeptical about it, but they do suggest they have a
| control group to observe in this study. Despite not being able to
| pinpoint an actual effect of these genetic markets.
| vessenes wrote:
| This is basic Mediterranean basin wisdom, known for a very long
| time: "I am a jealous God punishing the sins of the parents to
| the third and fourth generation." One of the two mentions also
| says blessings are passed down 1000 generations, both of which
| seem pretty in line with modern evolutionary and epigenetic
| theory.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| It does, doesn't it. The undesirable traits are weeded out and
| the desirable traits remain in the pool.
| uludag wrote:
| These seem to be rather different things though. I'm pretty
| sure this biblical passage is referring to a metaphysical
| concept, involving morality. Plus this article is a study about
| being on the receiving end of violence, not being the
| perpetrator of.
| cess11 wrote:
| Bronze age morality was rather different than what most
| readers here will have in mind when seeing you use that word.
| janalsncm wrote:
| The problem I have (besides the fact that its guidances are
| often quite different from contemporary norms) is that it
| doesn't capture the complexity of what I would consider to
| be interesting ethical questions.
|
| For example, is it ethical to create a company which
| automates the job of a large class of workers? Is it
| ethical to use such a product? I don't even think the
| Golden Rule can account for it, frankly, because the
| "others" in "do unto others" can be multiple parties, some
| of whom are helped and some who are harmed.
| ajuc wrote:
| Exodus 20:5, "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I,
| the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of
| the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth
| generations o those who hate Me,"
|
| It's repeated in like dozen different places that you punish
| people for their parents sins to a few generations down.
|
| On the other hand Ezekiel 18:20, "The person who sins will die.
| The son will not bear the punishment for the father's iniquity,
| nor will the father bear the punishment for the son's iniquity;
| the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and
| the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself."
|
| And then there's the original sin - which is punished for
| infinite number of generations.
|
| Bible is using the oldest trick in the world - holding every
| position at the same time :) That way no matter what happens
| you can find a quote which supports it (also contradicts, but
| you don't share these).
| archibaldJ wrote:
| I think the interesting thing here though is the notion of
| `am a jealous God`.
|
| Note: Exodus 20:5 and Similar Passages: The concept of
| "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the
| third and fourth generation" is often understood in the
| context of the collective nature of ancient Israelite
| society. It emphasizes the idea that the consequences of sin
| can affect subsequent generations, particularly in a communal
| and covenantal context. This does not necessarily mean direct
| punishment, but rather the natural repercussions and
| influence of one generation's behavior on the next.
|
| So one interpretation is that: these people's descendants are
| not directly punished bust just less favorable by God given
| the jealous nature of God (i.e. the jealous nature to the
| degree that is expressed in Exodus 20:5 if we take Exodus
| 20:5 at face value as composed by Moses at the cultural-
| political time when he received the Commandments where God
| proclaimed that He is a jealous God)
|
| On the other hand, regarding Ezekiel 18:20, it is a verse
| that is a part of a broader discussion in Ezekiel 18 that
| emphasizes individual responsibility when it was composed by
| the prophet Ezekiel ~6th century BCE, during the Babylonian
| exile. So once again, one good interpretation can be that due
| to the cultural-political background at that time, God's
| message to humanity (for the betterment of humanity) was in a
| tone where He emphasized less on His jealous aspect and more
| on the individualism of sins - which is interestingly very
| similar to the idea of karma formulated in Shakyamuni's
| Dharma, which was also around that time in human history.
| ajuc wrote:
| > This does not necessarily mean direct punishment, but
| rather the natural repercussions and influence of one
| generation's behavior on the next.
|
| This is a rationalization. If you try to interpret it
| honestly you can find dozen different places where god
| punish random people for sins of their relatives (for
| example "unoborn kids" in cities genocided by Old Testament
| Israelites either through regular war crimes or direct
| God's magical intervention).
|
| And then there's the fragment that says that God will not
| punish a city if there's even one honest man there.
|
| The only way to make it consistent is to ignore
| contradictions. And I'd say it would be easier to ignore
| the few ones that are against collective responsibilty
| (because there's far fewer of them).
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > This is a rationalization. If you try to interpret it
| honestly
|
| You are proceeding to not try to interpret it honestly;
| and thinking you are a genius for pointing out a supposed
| contradiction, because this hasn't been studied and
| researched for over 3,000 years at this point.
|
| > for example "unoborn kids" in cities genocided by Old
| Testament Israelites either through regular war crimes or
| direct God's magical intervention
|
| You seem to forget that Egypt, the land where they came
| from, was literally putting them to genocide first by
| ordering them to kill all male children; and any country
| they relocated to, would also have happily committed
| genocide against them if possible.
|
| We also know from both the Bible and remaining physical
| evidence that the exterminated tribes were practicing
| horrific activities of their own. The Canaanites, for
| example, practiced child sacrifice to Molek, and (though
| not in the Bible, but from remaining historical evidence)
| even practiced ritual cannibalism. A command to
| exterminate them therefore should not be interpreted as
| intrinsically immoral or undeserved.
| ajuc wrote:
| 1. Astrology was debated even longer and also still
| exists. It's not an argument.
|
| 2. I'm not claiming to be genious. In fact I was pretty
| hardcore Catholic for like 22 years before I stopped
| lying to myself.
|
| > You seem to forget that Egypt
|
| Genociding Phillites' kids because some adult Egyptians
| were killing Jews is evil.
|
| > The Canaanites, for example, practiced child sacrifice
| to Molek
|
| Their infants did?
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| > before I stopped lying to myself
|
| Yeah, no; you found something the church called a sin
| that you could not, or did not, want to overcome.
|
| > Genociding Phillites' kids because some adult Egyptians
| were killing Jews is evil.
|
| If evil is only an opinion of mind, who is to say?
| Russians call Ukrainians evil; Ukrainians call Russia
| evil; both kill the other. In your opinion, it was evil;
| but if you were forced between accepting a genocide
| against yourself on one hand, or fleeing and causing a
| genocide to survive, you may have different opinions.
| minitech wrote:
| > Yeah, no; you found something the church called a sin
| that you could not, or did not, want to overcome.
|
| what a convenient all-purpose dismissal of any
| experiences that challenge your view
| mightyham wrote:
| The Bible is a small library of different books written by
| different people at different times. I don't think it's all
| that surprising that there are contradictions. In fact, I
| would say that pretty much every faith tradition with a long
| literary history suffers from this problem. I don't think
| that undermines that idea we can glean meaningful wisdom from
| sacred texts.
| simpaticoder wrote:
| Flat contradiction undermines wisdom and empowers sophists.
| The most interesting aspect to sacred texts is the question
| of why some succeeded and some failed. What is the appeal?
| Within that context, the contradictions themselves serve a
| purpose, increasing the utility of the text particularly
| with those with a taste for power.
| mightyham wrote:
| The problem is that sacred texts like the Bible (other
| examples might be the Pali Cannon in Buddhism or Vedas
| and Upanishads in Hinduism) do not contain "flat
| contradictions". If people hundreds of years apart write
| down conflicting ideas that later get complied together
| by another person/group who are using those texts for
| non-logical spiritual guidance, in what way is that a
| meaningful contradiction? Also, the idea that wisdom must
| be strictly rational is a modern, scientific standard
| that these texts fundamentally disagree with.
| ajuc wrote:
| If you redefine words and ignore logic - you can salvage
| anything, sure.
|
| I'm not sure what's the point tho. If you start with
| abandoning logic - you cannot later return back to using
| it. Starting with 0==1 you can prove anything.
|
| If Bible gets away with contradictions - you can't then
| accept the conclusions and use logic on them. The moment
| you abandoned logic you are left without it forever.
| Full-blown postmodernism. Nothing is true and everything
| is true.
| protonbob wrote:
| Using any of these passages as a prooftext for a particular
| position about the effects of God's wrath and drawing a
| singular conclusion from them is indeed incorrect, but it
| does not mean that there is a real contradiction. For example
| take these two passages.
|
| Proverbs 26:4 (ESV) "Answer not a fool according to his
| folly, lest you be like him yourself." Proverbs 26:5 (ESV)
| "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his
| own eyes."
|
| They are "contradictory" but yet right next to each other. It
| can rather be taken that these are both true in certain
| contexts and must be held in tension against one another and
| applied with wisdom.
|
| There are multiple instances of this in the old and new
| testaments.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Sheesh, good thing G-d decided to take a chill pill somewhere
| between the Old and New Testaments.
| bregma wrote:
| Does this rehabilitate Lysenkoism?
|
| I am a little confused by how there can be epigenetic genetic
| modifications. I'm not a biologist, but it seems to me that if
| it's epigenetic, it's not genetic and vice-versa.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I'm not a biologist either, but from my reading there are many
| cellular elements that influence genetic expression that are
| not encoded in DNA. And those elements can mutate as a result
| of the individual's experience during their lifetime. Some of
| them have independent genetic lines. DNA = behavior is
| reductive.
| retep_kram wrote:
| "While our genes are not changed by life experiences, they can
| be tuned through a system known as epigenetics."
|
| It is indeed not a modification of the genetic code. And the
| transmission of epigenetic state from one generation to the
| next is much less straightforward.
| bregma wrote:
| The article says this. But there is another
| lasting effect of the attack, hidden deep in the genes of
| Syrian families. The grandchildren of women who were pregnant
| during the siege -- grandchildren who never
| experienced such violence themselves -- nonetheless bear
| marks of it in their genomes. Passed down through their
| mothers, this genetic imprint offers the first human
| evidence of a phenomenon previously documented only in
| animals: The genetic transmission of stress across multiple
| generations.
|
| The article clearly implies a modify of the genes. The genome
| is altered.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| The actual study doesn't make that claim, the article is
| presenting it incorrectly. They're talking about a
| methylation on certain genes. Think of it as amplification
| or attenuation and of a signal. The signal is the same,
| just weaker or stronger.
| adammarples wrote:
| I've read the article, I've read the comments. Nobody has
| remotely tried to explain how these changes are
| heritable, at all. The article had an image with the word
| "germline", which was never expounded on.
| ikanreed wrote:
| The press release writer was a bit shit at understanding basic
| scientific jargon. The research only finds epigenetic markers.
| There are no genetic changes. There are detectable changes to
| gene _expression_ , and that's it.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| So why do we discuss genes if we actually mean heritable
| traits? Scientists should probably take the lead in
| abandoning "gene" as a generally useful concept outside of
| their field.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I'm also very skeptic of the way these affirmations are made.
| Other studies I've read boil down to epigenetic changes caused
| by stress, not actual DNA rewriting, otherwise it wouldn't go
| back to normal ever. In other words, these epigenetic changes
| are directly proportional to how stressful the environment
| remains.
|
| The article mentions Hama, where a massacre occurred, and 40
| years later the inhabitants still show epigenetic changes
| caused by stress. Surely the environment still being stressful
| is more to blame than their ancestor's genetic memory.
|
| There's great danger of misinterpreting this kind of research
| to bolster ideological agendas. I've seen this misused as "my
| grandpa was a victim of the holocaust, so I, born into and
| living a comfortable and peaceful life, am also a holocaust
| victim and deserve respect".
| rawgabbit wrote:
| The genes (code sequences stored in the DNA) are not modified.
|
| Epigenetics is a recent discovery that the genes can be muted
| or not expressed).
|
| The mechanism is that parts of the DNA strand often curl
| themselves up in a ball which prevents themselves from being
| replicated/expressed. Researchers are discovering there are
| many factors that influence this behavior.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I think it's better to describe methylation as up or down
| regulation.
| im3w1l wrote:
| To a very minor degree. If DNA is a compiled binary,
| epigenetics is like the settings database. It can toggle and
| alter behaivor and it has some degree of persistence, but
| ultimately it can only change things in ways allowed by the
| binary.
| nahuel0x wrote:
| Maybe Darwinian evolution has the intrinsic tendency to evolve
| Lamarckian heredity mechanisms.
| adammarples wrote:
| The article doesn't really explain it, but looking at the image
| provided, I think I understand. A girl is born with all her
| eggs already, so the egg germ cell that becomes the grandchild
| is already present inside the grandmother while she is pregnant
| with the mother. In this case, the genes being methylated are
| in the cell which will go on to become the grandchild. Changes
| themselves are not being passed down through generations, per
| se, but are being effected in the 3rd generation at the instant
| of the trauma itself.
| mannyv wrote:
| "offers the first human evidence"
|
| That's untrue. There was plenty of evidence for epigenetics
| before this study. The one that I remember is the Overkalix study
| in Sweden.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| There isn't a single other human study showing methylation
| persisting on the same genes across 3 generations. It's only
| been demonstrated in mice once prior and with some controversy.
| cryptophreak wrote:
| While the article frames this phenomenon as self-evidently
| negative, I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a
| driver of island tameness
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_tameness) in humans. To
| quote Theodore Roosevelt:
|
| "The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the
| end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even
| sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of
| each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of
| pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder
| people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which
| makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful."
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| We evidently hate the weak, egalitarianism, happiness,
| pacifism, jainists/unitarians universalists/Baha'i, etc.
| Humanity's favorite emotion is Schadenfreude.
|
| This sword of damocles shit that justifies the boot being on
| our face forever can fuck right off.
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Honestly it's one of those ideas that make less sense the
| more you think about it. That quote and wikipedia link is
| drawing a connection between history as it was understood in
| the 19th century (e.g. unilineal evolutionism) and the
| behaviour of dodos.
| justonceokay wrote:
| This might have been true before technology but yet again the
| nerds ruin everything. Now that I think about it, this theory
| doesn't really hold past tribalism. The Industrial Revolution
| is why England could conquer half the planet, not the brutish
| nature of the English.
|
| Maybe in the future even the drones will have ennui and want to
| become dancers.
| cryptophreak wrote:
| Technology may be more predictive of conflict abroad than at
| home. If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not
| be able to bomb our way out of it.
| imchillyb wrote:
| > If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not be
| able to bomb our way out of it.
|
| Why would you state this as if it were fact? It's not true.
|
| Our own generals bombed the most important trade hub of the
| time, Atlanta, during the civil war.
|
| Bombs are highly effective, and location matters little to
| their effectiveness or usefullness.
|
| We dropped plenty of bombs in unreachable parts of
| Afghanistan. Were those effective? Yes, they were. Were
| those bombs as effective, in that region of uninhabitable
| tunnels and cliffs, as they would be in an urban setting?
| No, of course not.
|
| Bombs are still the go-to attack and defense strategy.
| Bombs reduce the need for boots on the ground. Bombs reduce
| the enemy's ability to go to ground and hide.
|
| If we faced a land invasion, in the USA, we would
| absolutely-certainly utilize modern weaponry, including
| bombs, to displace the enemy.
|
| To say otherwise is to disregard history. To say otherwise
| is to place hope in pie-in-the-sky feelings and not the
| data we've accumulated over the last 200 years.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _We dropped plenty of bombs in unreachable parts of
| Afghanistan. Were those effective? Yes, they were_
|
| In the short term, yes. In the long term the US
| eventually gave up and left. Likewise, the US bombed
| Vietnam heavily, eventually gave up and left. You can't
| hold territory with bombs.
|
| _To say otherwise is to disregard history. To say
| otherwise is to place hope in pie-in-the-sky feelings and
| not the data we 've accumulated over the last 200 years._
|
| Every military historian will tell you the same thing I
| just did, and cite examples going back thousands of years
| - military arson serves the same function as bombing.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > The Industrial Revolution is why England could conquer half
| the planet, not the brutish nature of the English
|
| I don't think that quote is about being brutish. The idea is
| that when times get easy, defence lowers (as why spend on
| defence?) and eventually someone else who is not living in
| luxury takes over, if they can reach you. I don't know if
| it's a valid theory, but I don't think it's about anyone's
| nature in particular.
| notahacker wrote:
| Relatively speaking, the times were a lot easier when the
| UK was conquering the world than when it wasn't, but times
| being easy didn't stop it from being effective at
| conquering the world when it had a tech advantage. Times
| were pretty easy when it sacrificed a lot of men in two
| world wars where it didn't have a tech advantage (and could
| probably have afforded to weasel out) too.
| jahewson wrote:
| Furthermore the Industrial Revolution stimulated the _need_
| for a trading empire to supply its materials. Nowadays we
| have global free trade (enforced by the US Navy - yet more
| technology) so trading empires are unnecessary.
| inetknght wrote:
| Some might argue that the US Navy enforces trade to be more
| free for some than others.
| concordDance wrote:
| I often hear this, but other than cotton, what industrial
| materials needed to be imported?
|
| My understanding is that coal, wood and iron ore were
| plentiful in England itself.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Respectfully. The idea that civilization makes men weak is
| bullshit. It was the agrarian centralized societies that waged
| war and destroyed the nomadic hunter gatherers. The more
| centralized, the more technologically advanced, the more
| successful a society is in war.
|
| The exception to this rule is when a society destroyed itself
| through civil war. The western Roman empire destroyed itself
| during the Crisis of the Third Century when one regional
| commander after another declared himself emperor. Even during
| Augustus' time, the elite had a habit of cutting off their sons
| thumbs to avoid being conscripted into the legions.
|
| The steppe nomads who conquered China (Mongols), Persia
| (Mongols), Byzantines (Turks), and India (Moghuls) were able to
| rule for centuries thereafter even after becoming "civilized".
| I would also argue this "civilizing" process was also a myth.
| The ruling elite kept their own traditions and cultures and
| lived separately from the people they ruled.
| pc86 wrote:
| Civilization makes a society successful in war because of the
| destructive power of the weaponry available. But it
| absolutely seems reasonable that individual people could be
| less fit for physical combat as the above aspects of
| civilization (materialism, luxury, etc.)
| lsy wrote:
| I don't know that this is super well-founded: It seems similar
| to the "Fremen Mirage" [1], and misses that in most cases the
| society that escapes war for longer will have time and energy
| to build infrastructure and accumulate resources that provide a
| decisive advantage in conflict and defense. Looking back at
| history it's rare that the "virile fighting" nation/group wins
| against a more "civilized" adversary that's better organized
| and resourced.
|
| [1] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-
| mirage-...
| DocTomoe wrote:
| Of course, then we have groups like 'The United States of
| America', which has been at war basically every single hour
| in the last 100 years, and seems to be doing just right. At
| some point, you become powerful enough so that infrastructure
| does not help against you anymore (and may even become a
| liability: The conflicts the US does the worst in is wherever
| guerrilla warfare is waged, not where there are highways and
| telecommunication networks).
| rpastuszak wrote:
| > I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a driver of
| island tameness [...] in humans
|
| Why?
| Fin_Code wrote:
| I'm not sure why they are calling out a specific conflict. People
| don't have objective violence barometers. Every act of new worst
| violence you ever experience is the worst ever until something
| worse happens.
| streptomycin wrote:
| I didn't read this study, but I can't help but comment that past
| studies on this topic are of dubious quality
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma#Criti...
| so very likely this is nonsense too.
|
| I think the main problem is that something like "science proves
| generational trauma is real" is a nice headline, so people p-hack
| it into existence. "Science proves that generational trauma is
| not real" is just a null hypothesis being confirmed - not a
| publishable result and nobody cares, so you'll never hear about
| it. So be very skeptical of nice headlines, especially in
| university press releases!
| ch4s3 wrote:
| I read this study earlier in the week. It doesn't have a larger
| sample size, but the way they identified the genes could
| present problems. They did a whole genome search and found 21
| genes with the associated change, across 131 participants. It's
| hard to know if f they've correctly isolated that the cause is
| the conflict exposure. There could be a lot of other things
| going on here. The first group where the grandmothers were
| exposed all moved to Jordan in 1980, and the other group on
| 2011. There could be something about moving to and living in
| Jordan that caused the methylation.
|
| Here's the link to the study
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
| derektank wrote:
| "There's new evidence that historical trauma is passed down
| through changes to the genome!"
|
| "Genome or epigenome?"
|
| "...epigenome."
|
| I feel like I read of a similar study every few years, the first
| I can recall was 'Transgenerational response to nutrition, early
| life circumstances and longevity'[1], and it is always needlessly
| disappointing to thumb through past the headline and read that,
| inevitably, the media has decided to report this as a change to
| the genome when the actual research suggests otherwise.
|
| Epigenetic changes are interesting in their own right! But they
| don't change human genes, at most they change gene _expression_.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/5201832
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| > But they don't change human genes, at most they change gene
| expression.
|
| It's not clear in this case what the difference is between
| gene, gene expression, and gene encoding. What does gene mean
| if it does not imply either encoding or expression? If this is
| a disagreement about the semantics of encoding, surely it'd be
| easiest to express this in terms of encoding. If this is about
| gene expression, surely it'd be easiest to express this in
| terms of expression. "gene" largely has no meaning outside of
| encoding/expression.
|
| It seems clear to me the article is indicating a distinction of
| encoding. I'm not sure where the ambiguity is.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _What does gene mean if it does not imply either encoding
| or expression?_
|
| The less mutable part. The strongly heritable stuff. Genes
| are part of your body, as is your brain, that doesn't mean
| your every thought is equivalent to DNA.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| So, you're referring to encoding via DNA? Why not just say
| that explicitly rather than refer to some occluded
| understanding of the word "gene"?
|
| This also seems to be a semantic distinction largely
| irrelevant to understanding the article as presented.
| tpoacher wrote:
| Having said that, there's some very recent research to
| suggest that memories / neuronal weights are actually
| encoded directly in neuronal DNA.
|
| (this does not mean that this DNA is directly heritable,
| since it does not necessarily end up in the gametes, but it
| is still interesting that, yes, in fact, it involves DNA
| change)
| sdwr wrote:
| Yeah, people are holding on to the rigid, simplistic,
| outdated notion that DNA is the "genetic code" that defines
| everything.
|
| I think neural nets show that, realistically, evolution
| requires backpropagation (epigenetics).
| rightbyte wrote:
| I don't think it requires it but it would certainly be an
| edge with "backpropagation"?
| derefr wrote:
| First, a point of clarification: _coding_ and _encoding_ are
| two different things. "Encoding" is a CS term that doesn't
| come up much in biology. (You could say that DNA is an
| _encoding_ of a base-4 number sequence.) "Coding" is a
| bioinformatics term -- DNA base-pairs _code for_ particular
| RNA sequences; and then, only if they 're in a _coding
| region_. (Analogy: flux patterns on a floppy disk _code for_
| particular bytes, but only if they 're in a _sector_.)
|
| Second: what are genes? A "gene" is an abstraction.
|
| Let's first define a "genome". A _genome_ is the complete
| dump of raw data of "what the DNA base-pair sequence string
| says" -- _before_ any coding or expression occurs. Whenever
| we _sequence_ DNA, it 's [parts of] this raw base-pair string
| that we get back -- not the codons, not the expressed RNA
| sequences. And this is why we care -- sequencing is the tool
| we have, so it's the lens by which we look at DNA. And that
| lens shows us the raw data.
|
| When we talk about "genes" (or "SNPs" / other bioinformatics
| terms), we're basically talking about the ways in which that
| raw data we can extract through sequencing, relates to
| observed phenotypic changes. A "gene" is a particular part of
| a "genome" (DNA base-pair sequence) that can be uniquely
| identified as being the cause of interesting phenotypic
| consequences when changes are made to it. (Which in turn is
| how we figure out what genes are "responsible for" doing
| what.)
|
| Note how these concepts, "genome" and "gene", both completely
| ignore epigenetics / gene expression. That's because these
| terms were invented before epigenetics was invented, and
| these terms are part of a model that uses a lens (DNA
| sequencing) that _itself_ ignores epigenetics. Gene
| sequencing shows you the world of DNA as if epigenetics didn
| 't exist.
|
| Now let's talk about DNA.
|
| If you think that epigenetics is about changing how DNA
| _encodes_ information, then you might be thinking of "DNA"
| via the lie-to-children model, of it _just_ being a long
| sequence of nucleotides.
|
| But consider: why do chromosomes look the way they do --
| little X shapes? A long string of base pairs, on its own, has
| no reason to assemble into that macroscopic shape.
|
| This is because "DNA" -- which is really a shorthand for "the
| DNA complex" (i.e. a _complex_ of multiple weakly-bound
| molecules that together form the chromatin of a chromosome)
| -- is not just nucleotide base-pairs. The nucleotide base-
| pairs form one molecule (the deoxyribonucleic acid string
| itself); but then you 've got other stuff. You've got
| histones -- little tape-spools the DNA string is wrapped
| onto. You've got methyl groups -- little markers hanging
| _off_ particular places on the DNA string. You 've got other
| stuff I don't personally understand/know about.
|
| When lay-people talk about "DNA", they're really referring to
| the whole complex of molecules that makes up each one of your
| chromosomes.
|
| "Genes" are just the bioinformatic data representation of the
| deoxyribonucleic-acid-base-pair-string part of that complex
| of molecules.
|
| But gene _coding_ , and gene _expression_ , are both a result
| of what the _other_ molecules in that complex are doing.
|
| (Think about it: if gene coding + expression were encoded
| _in-band_ by the DNA itself, then that information would be
| appear in DNA sequencing -- and so we 'd be unable to
| differentiate that information from changes to the DNA itself
| -- and so we wouldn't even have a concept of "epigenetics",
| because it would all just look like "genetics"!)
|
| Here's a picture: https://www.genome.gov/sites/default/files/
| media/images/2022...
|
| Histones -- those little tape spools -- attract or repel
| each-other due to chemical modifications to the histones
| themselves. Two histones that "snap together", prevent the
| region of DNA "tape" between them from being physically
| accessed by the RNA polymerase enzymes that "read the tape"
| to produce RNA.
|
| Methylation markers hang off of the initial "landing sites"
| for RNA polymerase enzymes (CpG dinucleotides -- think
| "floppy-disk sector header"), and repel them.
|
| When you sequence DNA, you ignore these transcription-
| silencing signals. You can picture DNA sequencing as
| "unrolling" the deoxyribonucleic acid off of its histone
| carriers, rendering them irrelevant; and then using molecular
| tools to read the sequence -- tools that, unlike RNA
| polymerase, are not repelled by methyl-groups.
|
| If you use more-modern techniques to capture this additional
| information about where these silenced regions are, and by
| what mechanism they've been silenced, then you get what we
| call an "epigenome" -- which isn't a post-translated version
| of DNA, but rather sort of a "metadata track" that runs
| parallel to the DNA "data track."
|
| (And you can, in theory, _combine_ the two to calculate an
| "expressed genome." I don't think we've ever done that yet --
| partly because "whole-epigenome sequencing" doesn't yet exist
| in the way that "whole-genome sequencing" does; and partly
| because epigenetic metadata is _probabilistic_ -- with some
| modifications _decreasing the probability_ of a region coding
| for something, rather than turning it off altogether -- and
| so current approaches, that derive the epigenome "by
| reaction", would observe something like "weak bits" on a
| floppy disk -- regions that read differently each time,
| requiring many passes to calculate a "flux strength" for each
| region and to find each silenced region's true borders.)
| crdrost wrote:
| This is the sort of long-form comment that I'd write and
| love to read, signed in just to upvote it, well-put!
|
| Nit: chromosomes mostly don't look like little X-shapes
| except during cell division, which was historically a
| useful time to image them (I think because the dye couldn't
| get through the cell-nucleus wall but during cell division
| it has dissolved?). But then you are seeing _two_
| chromosomes that happen to be bound at a centromere before
| that centromere gets torn into two by the cytoskeleton
| dividing the cell in half.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| > A "gene" is a particular part of a "genome" (DNA base-
| pair sequence)
|
| See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've
| simply failed on step one to identify how humans
| communicate. Regardless of if you're referring to "coding"
| or "encoding" (I'm not sure of the semantic difference
| between these two terms, frankly, nor an understanding why
| this distinction is worth presenting without remediation) a
| gene is still a heritable trait, not a specific span of a
| specific encoding of a specific molecule. A gene is,
| colloquially, a heritable trait that implies no specifics
| about how it's coded/encoded into whatever substrate you
| choose. You're referring to a far more specific term most
| people won't recognize as meaningful, and you can either
| explicitly describe what you're discussing or accept that
| people will misunderstand you.
|
| I see you're trying to advocate for specific terminology to
| agree on, but it's far more effective to meet people where
| they already are rather than trying to push jargon onto
| others.
|
| If I'm wrong, that people specifically refer to subsets of
| a DNA encoding by referring to "gene", please educate me.
| derefr wrote:
| > See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but
| you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans
| communicate.
|
| No. There are _two distinct ways_ in which humans
| communicate.
|
| * Humans create and use _words_ , whose usage stretches
| and spreads and grows and can only be defined
| descriptively.
|
| * Humans (doing professional/technical/scientific work)
| also define-into-existence _jargon terms_ -- the meaning
| of which is set in stone at the moment of creation.
|
| Jargon terms are verbal handles we use to grasp parts of
| particular, well-defined mental models -- models that are
| taught and learned as coherent systems of such terms;
| models that exist to enable their users to think
| rigorously, and collaborate without corruption of
| meaning/loss of rigor, to "get things done" in those
| professional/technical/academic contexts.
|
| Jargon terms, therefore, can always be said --
| definitively, objectively(!) -- to have been employed
| _correctly_ or _incorrectly_ in any given text, _per the
| mental model in which the jargon term is defined_.
|
| Sometimes, professionals/technical people/scientists are
| dumb and silly, and attempt to invent a jargon term _made
| of words_ , where those words, put together in that
| order, have such an _obvious, novel, and useful_ lay
| usage, that it is inevitable that anyone who hears the
| term will _already_ think they know what it means,
| _before_ ever being formally taught what it means.
|
| "Begs the question" is an example of this -- there is
| something so uniquely useful about the _lay_ meaning of
| that phrase (essentially "a situation that demands that
| an unstated question be asked"), that whoever named (or
| more likely, translated from Latin into English) that
| logical fallacy, _made a mistake_ by choosing to use
| those words to name it.
|
| But that situation is rare.
|
| Most of the time, professionals/technical
| people/scientists make up a word all on their own, to
| _be_ jargon, entirely for their own use. (Often they use
| Latin for this, as an intentional way to dodge the
| aforementioned problem of the word "seeming like it has
| an intuitive meaning" in any living language. But they
| don't have to. They can also just make up a nonsense
| word, perhaps one inspired by a Latin prefix or something
| -- a word like "gene.")
|
| And then, through a pipeline of scientific discoveries,
| to science journalism, to pop-science, to regular people
| just talking about how their aunt has asthma due to "that
| bad gene she got from her father" -- somewhere along the
| line, someone _screws up_ in how they 're using the
| jargon term; and that screwed-up understanding
| _proliferates_.
|
| But jargon terms -- at least the ones that are part of
| mental models anyone still employs any more -- must still
| be _used to do work_. And they cannot function to do that
| work, if people can 't use them with the implicit
| understanding that they are communicating an _exact,
| precise, well-defined_ idea. Such words are not merely
| words; they are professional tools. The professionals
| that use these tools, _cannot allow them_ to be
| corrupted, to have their meanings diffuse.
|
| And so, at least the professionals themselves, will
| always be taught that any jargon term they learn has one
| specific meaning -- that it acts as a handle for a
| particular concept in a particular mental model.
|
| And those professionals will insist on this strictness
| when working with any technical writer or editor.
|
| And this strictness diffuses from there, into any
| editorial context where editors consider themselves to
| _be_ professionals, working for a publication that
| expects _professionalism_ -- whether that publication is
| technical or non-technical.
|
| In professional editing, is always expected that if any
| term (word or phrase) is used which is known to be a
| (unique, non-colliding) jargon term rooted in some
| technical/academic mental model, then that term should
| _only_ be permitted if it is being used _with its
| original jargon meaning_. Any other handling of such a
| term is considered a usage error, effectively a typo.
|
| (For _non_ -unique/colliding jargon terms where lay usage
| exceeds jargon usage, the lay-usage is given represented
| by plain printing, while the jargon usage is represented
| by italic printing. This only ever comes up with phrases
| -- "begging the question" again -- because even the most
| ivory-tower academics know that overloading the meanings
| of single extant lay words is a stupid way to invent
| jargon.)
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| This is a long spiel to justify refusing trying to
| communicate in an effective manner. I understand the
| concept of professionals recognizing the quality
| standards others put forward, but at some point you've
| got to care if you even come of as sensical to non-
| professionals if you want to communicate to them. This
| necessarily implies a reaction to something not being
| "but they misused the word gene!!!".
| derefr wrote:
| It doesn't matter when _lay people_ misuse professional
| jargon. It matters when _professionals speaking to lay
| people_ misuse professional jargon. (As was what was
| being pointed out as wrong about the OP article -- it
| _is_ professional writing, from the PR department of a
| university!)
|
| In other words, it's about "those who know" being a _role
| model_ for correct usage by "those who don't know."
|
| (Why bother? Because then people are more likely to _come
| into_ the profession with an understanding of the concept
| that 's at least _compatible_ with teaching them the
| model; rather than having an understanding of the model
| so debased that they need to actively unlearn it before
| they can learn the correct model.)
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| > It matters when professionals speaking to lay people
| misuse professional jargon.
|
| Who is the grand arbiter of whether or not use this use
| is "misuses" or, perahs "correct", whatever that means--
| the professionals, or the lay people?
| robwwilliams wrote:
| You are not wrong but even among biologists and
| geneticists there are differences of opinion and
| differences of context. If a mouse geneticist says they
| knocked out gene X they usually mean that they
| inactivated the production of mRNA from a specific gene
| "model". If you were talking to Richard Dawkins he would
| have a much more expansive definition of a "gene" that
| would include a much longer sequence of DNA (many
| protein-coding genes) that remains in a particular state
| long enough to be selected for (or not) or to drift to
| fixation or extinction.
|
| It is not quite right to say: "a gene is ... a heritable
| trait." This definition equates gene with trait. Yes that
| is how Mendel thought about his results since he could
| only see and quantify traits. But there are still a
| depressingly large number of protein-coding genes without
| linkage to traits.
| ForTheKidz wrote:
| We are not generally mouse geneticists, though. We are
| assumably a proxy for the general public.
|
| > It is not quite right to say: "a gene is ... a
| heritable trait."
|
| This is a reality of communication you need to deal with:
| that's absolutely how people will interpret the term
| "gene".
|
| > Yes that is how Mendel thought about his results since
| he could only see and quantify traits. But there are
| still a depressingly large number of protein-coding genes
| without linkage to traits.
|
| From my perspective, from my exceedingly humble opinion,
| "heritable trait linked by reproduction and not culture"
| is absolutely how the public at large understands the
| term "gene". The fact that scientists cannot successfully
| link protein-coding to linguistically-bound traits is an
| issue that scientists will have to work around when
| communicating about the specifics of heritability,
| genetic determinism, and discretization of individuals.
| "Gene" is simply not a term you can reliably link to DNA
| in the popular consciousness and is likely not worth the
| effort or money to redefine.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Perfect example of the context of a definition being
| important.
| epgui wrote:
| > "Encoding" is a CS term that doesn't come up much in
| biology
|
| I am a biochemist. The term is absolutely used all the
| time, in the CS sense, in biology.
| jyounker wrote:
| I appreciate the effort you've put in above, but I think
| you're defining both gene and genome from too narrowly.
| Both terms predate our understanding of the structural
| mechanisms of heredity.
|
| A gene is a unit of heredity.
|
| The genome is the sum total of all genetic information in
| an organism.
|
| Both are extremely loose terms. Individual sub-fields of
| biology/biochemistry may use more specific variations in
| specific contexts, but the definitions above cover all of
| those meanings.
| derefr wrote:
| The terms were essentially redefined more strictly as our
| understanding of genetics grew more refined.
|
| (I.e. per my sibling post, there were jargon terms with
| these names that had one particular definition under an
| early, black-box mental model of heritability that is no
| longer used/favored; and there are new replacement jargon
| terms with the same names, that have a different
| definition under the more-modern mental model of
| _germline_ heritability.)
|
| After all, there are entirely non-genetic mechanisms of
| heredity. You inherit some of your mother's immune
| histochemistry through developmental exposure, and more
| through consuming breastmilk. Yet there is nothing that
| "codes" for this histochemistry; it's just a stateful
| process (mother's immune system) interacting with another
| stateful process (foetal immune system) -- working almost
| more like a "colonization" of commensal bacteria than
| like gene transfer.
|
| In terms of "heritable traits" -- "nature vs nurture" --
| such effects appear squarely on the "nature" side. But
| they're not _germline_ heritable. Implant the fertilized
| egg into a surrogate mother, and you get different
| histochemistry. Have a wetnurse feed the baby, and you
| get different histochemistry.
|
| If these things are "genetics" -- if the information
| carried by the state of immune cells in response to
| observing natal antigens is "genes" -- then the term
| "genetics" has no _useful_ meaning / is useless to talk
| about the thing we _want_ to talk about when we talk
| about genetics. Where "what we talk about when we talk
| about genetics", is _how an organism 's breeding/germline
| ancestry, predicts phenotypic outcomes_.
|
| And if you agree that that _is_ the thing we want to talk
| about -- then epigenetic information isn 't "genes"
| (under the germline-heritability model) either. Your
| epigenetics is hereditary, but only in the same sense
| that your immunohistochemistry is hereditary -- being
| passed via exposure in a natal environment, rather than
| being "written into" the fertilized egg.
|
| (Also -- at least AFAIK -- we don't even consider our
| nuclear mitochondrial DNA to be a part of _our_ genomes.
| Even though it _is_ passed through the germline, and is
| intensely important in many _congenital_ metabolic
| dysfunctions. Because our mitochondria are not
| technically "us" -- we might call them organelles, but
| they're still more like commensal prokaryotes in how
| cells treat them: dividing on a separate timeline from
| our cells; not assortatively assigned to daughter cells
| by spindle fibers during mitosis; not observed +
| checkpointed to ensure sufficient numbers exist for
| daughter cells before telophase; etc.)
| iaabtpbtpnn wrote:
| I learned a huge amount from this post, wish I could upvote
| it again, thanks for taking the time to write it all out!
| sensanaty wrote:
| I'm a complete layman here, but what is the difference exactly?
| arrosenberg wrote:
| DNA is source code, and there is a bunch of RNA processes
| that read it and do stuff to make you live. Parts of DNA can
| be turned on and off, that's called expression. Epigenetics
| is the study of how genes are expressed. Gene expression can
| change without the genome itself changing depending on
| external conditions, which is a key part of adaptability.
| derektank wrote:
| The gene itself determines the shape and character of a
| protein; Gene expression refers to the quantity of a protein
| produced. Changes to the genome are long lasting and somewhat
| rare inside a living person, while changes to the epigenome
| happen fairly regularly.
|
| A good way to think of this is cell differentiation. Every
| cell in your body, except eggs and sperm, contains a copy of
| your entire genome but what differentiates a nerve cell from
| a liver cell from a skin cell is gene expression. All it
| takes is some changes to the epigenome of a stem cell during
| mitosis for one the resulting cells to become a new,
| differentiated cell.
| rcthompson wrote:
| Imagine you have the text of a book in a word processor. You
| can change the text by typing new words or deleting ones that
| are there. You can also change the font, size, alignment,
| etc. The latter category of changes does not alter the words
| in the text, but it can affect how that text is interpreted,
| which parts of the text a reader focuses on, etc. The
| difference between a genetic alteration and an epigenetic
| alteration is conceptually similar. Genetics is changing the
| "text" of the genome while epigenetics is changing aspects of
| the genome that affect how that "text" is interpreted and
| used.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One is heritable, the other mostly not.
| derefr wrote:
| Personally, I think of DNA as being like the Linux kernel
| codebase. There's a lot of raw "code" there -- but not all of
| it ends up in every running kernel!
|
| DNA methyl-groups, acetylated histones, etc -- these are the
| config file generated by running `menuconfig`. They
| determine:
|
| 1. which components of the kernel the "compiler toolchain"
| (RNA polymerase) will actually "compile" (transcribe) into
| kernel-module objects (RNA sequences, proteins) -- in turn
| determining which "features" (developmental or metabolic
| processes) each of the components (cell/tissue types) of the
| resulting system (organism) will have; and
|
| 2. which #IFDEFs (coding regions) within those modules will
| actually be macro-enabled (expressed) during compile-time
| (transcription) -- in turn influencing / varying / tuning the
| strategies and logic (frequency of production / likelihood of
| expression, final shape / folding / binding affinities of
| proteins) used by any given component (cell/tissue type) to
| perform a given "feature" (developmental or metabolic
| process).
|
| (And just a tweak to steer this intuition pump -- your body
| doesn't have _one_ kernel, compiled _once_ at conception;
| rather, your body is more like a distributed system composed
| of machines running Gentoo -- _every cell_ has its own
| kernel, and each cell is "tweaking" and "recompiling" its
| kernel _regularly_. When cells undergo mitosis, both daughter
| cells inherit these tweaks -- that 's like setting up a new
| one of these machines by mirroring the hard drive from an
| existing machine, carrying over not just the kernel but also
| the at-snapshot version of the `menuconfig` configuration
| file.)
| relaxing wrote:
| > Personally, I think of DNA as being like the Linux kernel
| codebase
|
| oh my god would you shut up already
| banq wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00527-6
|
| The Information Theory of Aging
| hehbot wrote:
| to the kernel developer everything is a kernel
| derefr wrote:
| I'm not a kernel developer!
|
| The Linux kernel is just a much closer analogy than your
| average piece of software would be, because the Linux
| kernel actually has this distinct step that generates a
| standalone _build config file_ that later build steps
| read.
|
| Most regular software build infrastructure (autoconf,
| cmake, etc) just directly "burns in" any passed-in build
| config _as generated code_ , without any intermediary
| file storing the config itself -- which is a very
| different _and not-very-analogous_ process. (That 'd be
| more like if our epigenome was an extra chromosome of DNA
| built up during development!)
| derefr wrote:
| I work as an editor sometimes. I've worked in technical
| writing, though not specifically science journalism.
|
| My guess for why this keeps happening, is that it's a two-step
| process, fueled by a failure of communication:
|
| 1. The science writer themselves _does_ understand epigenetics
| -- but doesn 't think it's important to the point the article
| is making for the _reader_ to understand epigenetics. The
| writer wants to remove the requirement /assumption of
| "understanding epigenetics" from their writing, while still
| being technically correct in everything they say. So they
| choose to gloss an epigenetic change as "causing changes _to
| the DNA_. " (Which it certainly does! Either chemically -- to
| the DNA molecules themselves, through methylation; or
| structurally/topologically -- through modifications to the
| histones around which the DNA is wrapped.)
|
| 2. The science writer's not-so-scientific editor comes along,
| doing a stylistic editing pass; sees the word "DNA"; and says
| "hey, that's jargon, and we're aiming for accessibility here --
| we need to replace this." And they (incorrectly) decide that a
| valid 1:1 replacement for "DNA" is "genes" or "genome."
|
| This invalidating change _could_ be caught... _if_ the
| publication had a formal workflow step / requirement for the
| editor to perform a back-check with the original writer after
| copyediting + stylistic editing, to ensure that validity has
| not been compromised. I believe that big-name science journals
| and science magazines _do_ tend to have these back-check steps.
| But smaller publications -- like the PR departments of
| universities -- don 't.
| rcthompson wrote:
| I can't speak for every institution, but our PR department
| does as many back and forth passes as it takes for the
| scientists who did the work to sign off that any edits made
| still preserve scientific accuracy.
| bluGill wrote:
| I've never been in a science position, but if there are too
| many back and forths I assume it is a who has more
| willingness to put up with process before they just give up
| and sign off on anything.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| There have been past complaints by researchers about
| their research being misrepresented, despite clarifying.
|
| Unfortunately, they are just choosing to misrepresent the
| research sometimes.
| janalsncm wrote:
| If the editor is only editing for style and readability while
| adding factual mistakes along the way, they could be entirely
| replaced with ChatGPT in a tight loop with the science
| writer. Write article -> make style changes -> writer reviews
| again for correctness.
|
| It's inexcusable that the quality of science communication is
| so low.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| > The science writer themselves does understand epigenetics
| -- but doesn't think it's important to the point the article
| is making for the reader to understand epigenetics
|
| That's not a valid defense, otherwise they could write with a
| straight face that sun exposure causes genetic changes that
| make you darker, and how your descendants will inherit those
| changes too. It is dishonest writing, bordering on
| disinformation. Said article would attract clicks and
| attention like a cursed magnet, though.
| dpe82 wrote:
| To me the parent reads more as explanation than defense,
| and that's valuable.
|
| Human systems are imperfect and messy. Understanding how
| they break down helps us make them better.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| These studies are at the interface of genetics, sociology, and
| political action. They are underwhelming in all three domains.
| The genetics are based in puny sample sizes, and this has been
| true going back to the Yehuda study (2015, PMID: 26410355) and
| remains true of this broader followup (42 controls and only 18
| in the germline exposure group). I do not understand designing
| experiments like this and taking the results seriously, unless
| we move on to sociology and political action; in which case the
| motivation is clear:
|
| "...may encourage policymakers and humanitarian agencies to
| provide targeted resources to vulnerable populations..."
|
| Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of
| epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to
| decide who gets "healthcare access, special lodging,
| sanitation, and nutrition"? No, never.
|
| One could get a lot further a lot faster doing well controlled
| experiments in animal models. But even here the sociological
| context intrudes. Mike Meaney's original work in the early
| 2000s is still open to questions.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| A lot of sociology research is activist in nature and not
| rigorous. Is the study similar?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Activist "science" is how you turn "hard to argue with"
| cases into "there's plenty to argue with" ones.
| TwoPhonesOneKid wrote:
| I would say it's even better: if flushes out the
| engineers who never bother to grasp what "science"
| actually referred to. you'd think empirical observation
| and iteration would be an easy to grasp concept, but
| there are individuals that people get tripped up by
| something unidentifiable. you can spot a mile away. You
| can see it here, too. Not sure what causes the mental
| block but it seems to form serious social impediments.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Alas, even the rodent studies are not rigorous.
| Digory wrote:
| These arguments sometimes reach juries, who are asked to
| award damages based on "physical harms," in a separate
| category from "mental anguish."
|
| The argument that "brains are rewired" or "generations of
| genetics are harmed" is popular in 'trauma informed'
| arguments for compensation or government help.
| derefr wrote:
| > Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of
| epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to
| decide who gets "healthcare access, special lodging,
| sanitation, and nutrition"? No, never.
|
| I don't think the activism/sociological angle here was
| supposed to be interpreted as being about targeted
| reconciliation toward existing victims of violence / their
| descendants. Even if those people are potentially "living
| life on hard mode" as a result of previous violence. (After
| all, finding and helping those people would require _complex
| infrastructure_ and _lots of money_.)
|
| Rather, I think the thrust of the implicit activist argument
| would be closer to:
|
| 1. Experiencing violence turns out to be even worse for you
| than we thought -- and in non-recoverable ways! (You can't
| therapy your way out of epigenetic changes.)
|
| 2. And so more should be done to prevent/ameliorate violence
| and its impact on people, _before_ it can cause durable
| epigenetic changes;
|
| 3. ...and some "low-hanging fruit" in reducing this impact
| for minimal cost, would be to supply more resources for
| escaping/coping with violence (e.g. shelters; crisis lines;
| social workers; restraining orders that actually work)
| specifically to groups who are demographically most likely to
| become victims of violence.
|
| 4. And perhaps we can even use this correlation we've found
| to also measure the effectiveness of interventions like these
| -- sampling the trends in epigenomic changes in these
| vulnerable populations over time (i.e. a repeated cross-
| sectional study), to know if marginal increases in certain
| types of resources actually have measurable impacts on
| "cushioning" these populations from violence, enough to
| prevent these epigenetic changes.
| jacobgkau wrote:
| Your intentions are good, but you're just stating the same
| thing as what you quoted with more steps.
|
| Use this (faulty) explanation to make a statement about the
| impact of violence -> direct resources to one demographic
| or another based on that (faulty) explanation of why it's
| important.
|
| Your fourth point is entirely valid, if we were performing
| these measurements & experiments at a large enough scale to
| have a valid baseline in the first place (which GP was
| arguing is not the case).
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Your intentions are good, but you're just stating the
| same thing as what you quoted with more steps.
|
| Incorrect. The parent comment was talking about using
| epigenetic measurements of specific people to decide if
| they get resources. The child comment was not talking
| about doing that, instead saying that this research can
| be used to argue for more resources in general.
|
| The only mention of demographics in the child comment was
| about groups _likely_ to experience violence. Those
| groups would have no markers. It would be purely about
| how we can most effectively reduce violence.
|
| The only measurements suggested in the child comment
| would be for statistical purposes.
| wahern wrote:
| > You can't therapy your way out of epigenetic changes.
|
| Isn't that exactly what the study purports to show? Why
| would psychological trauma (i.e. negative nurturing) effect
| epigenetics but not psychological healing (i.e. positive
| nurturing)? What we consider "trauma" by modern standards
| would have been experienced by a huge fraction of every
| prior generation, and over the course of generations the
| entire population countless times over via epigenetic
| inheritance. Either it works both ways, even if unevenly,
| or it's BS (the framing if not the science). Ideological
| motivations aside, it just happens to be much easier to
| identify and track discrete incidences of severe trauma.
| derefr wrote:
| I think you may have misunderstood my statement.
|
| Yes, you can _cushion_ people from the effect of trauma
| _as it 's happening_, by providing resources _at or soon
| after_ the point of trauma.
|
| But your epigenome is a record (almost exclusively) of
| stuff that was observed _during your development_ -- it
| 's a log, not a state database.
|
| A particular epigenome-affecting gene process would look
| like: "when I was -6 months old, a process kicked off
| that began expressing a gene. This gene caused the
| expression of a protein that acted to detect whether
| there was enough magnesium in my blood or not. It
| detected that there _was_ enough -- and so the protein
| recorded [by not methylating anything] that I shouldn 't
| silence any of the copies of the magnesium-transporter in
| my intestinal-lining tissue cells. Then, the buildup of
| the protein caused the expression of another gene, which
| methylated [silenced] the first gene, permanently
| deactivating this magnesium detection step from happening
| again."
|
| Which means that trauma during early development -- if it
| _is not cushioned at the time, such that its_ impact is
| felt fully* -- will lead to some epigenome-affecting
| process that looks for "impact of trauma" _observing_
| said trauma as happening at the time it activates, and so
| _recording it_. That record, within the cell-line
| descending from the cell that made that observation, is
| now permanent; that tissue will now do whatever it does
| with that knowledge, from then on, for the rest of the
| organism 's life.
|
| Treating the trauma _later_ , will help the organism
| _psychologically_ , but will not change those markers
| (and whatever biological effects they have), because they
| are markers of "what was at a certain point", not "what
| is."
| naasking wrote:
| > You can't therapy your way out of epigenetic changes.
|
| That's a leap. After all, emotionally distressing
| experiences presumably caused the epigenetic changes to
| begin with, so why couldn't other mental experiences
| alleviate them? Not that we know how to do this at this
| point, I'm just stating that your claim is not a fact.
| derefr wrote:
| The way most epigenetic changes have been observed to
| work, is that information is collected by various "setup
| programs" (genes that activate on a timeline, and then
| silence themselves after "running.") These "setup
| programs" run only during development -- usually natal
| development, though some of this occurs as late as early
| childhood. And these "setup programs" store the resulting
| calculated "flags" as modifications to the epigenome.
|
| Crucially, because these "setup programs" silence
| themselves after running, these "setup programs" each
| only have _one_ opportunity to run, at some genetically-
| defined point in an organism 's lifecycle. The
| information is only collected once. Whatever this "setup
| program" observed _at that point_ , that's what the
| epigenome records. There is no second chance to set it
| differently.
|
| I don't know much about this violence finding, but one
| famous finding in epigenetics is that mammals whose
| mothers were often food-deprived during gestation, end up
| with a marker that correlates with the phenotype of
| eating more / being more food-motivated / tending more
| toward gathering more food than is necessary for their
| immediate satiation.
|
| At least in the case of this food-deprivation finding,
| there is nothing you can do to/with the animal afterward,
| that reverses the impact of this epigenetic change. The
| animal's body doesn't go back and re-evaluate whether or
| not it "should" be more food-motivated, because the fact
| it's basing its food-motivation calculations off isn't
| _about_ what 's true now -- it's about what _was_ true
| _then_. The marker doesn 't _mean_ "the environment is
| currently food-poor", it _means_ "the environment _was_
| food-poor when I was -6mo old. "
|
| (In fact, these early-natal-development epigenetic
| markers aren't even necessarily what you might call
| _runtime flags_ -- they 're more like an #IFDEF statement
| in the DNA "codebase", their values first calculated
| during the long, continuous "build process" of
| development, and then macro-expanded _later in that same
| build process_ to hard-code other things -- e.g. how
| certain proteins /tissues and their chemical receptors
| get built. By the time a baby is born, that marker might
| actually have no further relevance, having done all its
| work and made its downstream impacts _during gestation_.
| If we had "epigenetic CRISPR" and turned that marker off
| in an adult person, doing so would only impact whatever
| that gene does _after_ development -- which might be
| "nothing.")
| ch4s3 wrote:
| Yeah this study is pretty bad and I expect to unfortunately
| be hearing about it in corporate trainings in 10 years.
|
| *edit
|
| Anyone downvoting me should go read this study. The number of
| individuals exposed to the initial dose is in the single
| digits. There is no attempt to account for confounding
| variables. No mechanism is known that could account for the
| proposed effect. The preceding animal study they referenced
| has been HEAVILY criticized for methodological issues.
| TwoPhonesOneKid wrote:
| > Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of
| epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to
| decide who gets "healthcare access, special lodging,
| sanitation, and nutrition"?
|
| If you're speaking from an american perspective, this hand-
| wringing is unnecessary: we leave our own citizens exposed on
| the street. If we were capable of making decisions about who
| deserves xyz in the first place we wouldn't be living in such
| an obvious shithole to begin with. Maybe we should set our
| standards much lower if we aim for research to actually
| benefit humans.
| casey2 wrote:
| I've seen literal 7 year olds make the same mistakes when
| doing school projects on butterflies. Can professionals not
| do better than literal children?
| rcthompson wrote:
| Describing a change to DNA methylation "alters" a gene is
| technically correct in the sense that it is an change to the
| molecular structure of the DNA that makes up the gene, but is
| indeed misleading, because without further clarification a
| majority of people would assume it refers to a change in the
| gene sequence.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Should it not be "affects" or "influences"?
| rcthompson wrote:
| DNA methylation means adding one or more methyl groups to
| the DNA, so technically it is an alteration. But most
| people would assume that altering a gene specifically means
| changing the "letters" of the gene sequence that encode the
| protein, and that's not what DNA methylation does.
| johnisgood wrote:
| Oh, yeah, I suppose I read "influences behavior" a bit
| too much.
|
| I read about DNA methylation (well, epigenetics in
| general) in one book for behavioral epigenetics.
| adamc wrote:
| But since many of them misunderstand the role of gene
| sequences, that may be less meaningful than you imply.
| jyounker wrote:
| Gene and geneome are expansive terms. The genome refers to the
| sum total of all genetic material in an organism. Epigenenetic
| markers such as methylations are part of the genetic material,
| and are therefore part of the genome.
|
| You seem to be disappointed in the headline because you're
| expecting narrower definitions.
| epgui wrote:
| > they don't change human genes, at most they change gene
| expression.
|
| This is an extremely pedantic distinction, especially since the
| article as a whole is pretty clear.
|
| In nearly all cases, what matters is whether we're talking
| about information that is encoded and passed down. That's the
| case here, even if the encoding and persistance characteristics
| are different.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| It's a crucial difference. Encoding and persistence in your
| genome means permanent changes, not for a few generations,
| PERMANENT. Epigenetic encoding and persistence is temporary,
| even if it expresses for more than one generation.
|
| Crucial difference, one is a mutation, the other an
| environmental adaptation.
| epgui wrote:
| Essentially yes, and the article makes pretty clear that
| the changes last for generations.
|
| It's in the title and it's clear throughout the text of the
| article.
|
| So that's a totally moot point.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| If this headline's claim were true, why would it apply just to
| violence and not all experiences? Wouldn't it imply that all
| kinds of activities alter genes? For example if you play
| sports, you might get one type of change and if you were a
| lawyer, you might get another kind of change and so on.
| krapp wrote:
| You should read the actual article, which provides necessary
| context and nuance, and not just the headline. The article is
| specifically discussing the effect of stressors caused by
| trauma (violence) on the transmission of genes from mother to
| child. The effect discussed does not generalize to all
| experiences.
| svara wrote:
| DNA methylation is epigenetic, and that's a direct chemical
| alteration of DNA. The title isn't wrong, and your example
| sentence isn't wrong either.
| red75prime wrote:
| Epigenetic changes are scrubbed from germ cells. It's unclear
| whether observed persistence is explained by the changes
| escaping scrubbing process or by reintroduction due to other
| mechanism (being raised by a single mother, refugee hardships
| and the like).
| adolph wrote:
| Although the article text doesn't claim genomic changes, the
| untitled graphic mentions "germline" in the "1980 Group"
| column. Not certain how to interpret that. I don't see the
| graphic in any publication of Mulligan, Panter and Dajani
| altogether. Mulligan CJ, Clukay CJ, Matarazzo
| A, Hadfield K, Nevell L, Dajani R, Panter-Brick C. Novel GxE
| effects and resilience: A case:control longitudinal study of
| psychosocial stress with war-affected youth. PLoS One. 2022 Apr
| 4;17(4):e0266509. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266509. PMID:
| 35377919; PMCID: PMC8979449. Clukay CJ, Dajani R,
| Hadfield K, Quinlan J, Panter-Brick C, Mulligan CJ. Association
| of MAOA genetic variants and resilience with psychosocial
| stress: A longitudinal study of Syrian refugees. PLoS One. 2019
| Jul 17;14(7):e0219385. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0219385. PMID:
| 31314763; PMCID: PMC6636744. Panter-Brick C,
| Eggerman M, Ager A, Hadfield K, Dajani R. Measuring the
| psychosocial, biological, and cognitive signatures of profound
| stress in humanitarian settings: impacts, challenges, and
| strategies in the field. Confl Health. 2020 Jun 23;14:40. doi:
| 10.1186/s13031-020-00286-w. PMID: 32582366; PMCID: PMC7310257.
| FAAH, SLC6A4, and BDNF variants are not associated with
| psychosocial stress and mental health outcomes in a population
| of Syrian refugee youth Christopher J. Clukay, Anthony
| Matarazzo, Rana Dajani, Kristin Hadfield, Catherine Panter-
| Brick, Connie J. Mulligan bioRxiv 685636; doi:
| https://doi.org/10.1101/685636
| ilyagr wrote:
| I'm my mind, gene expression is at least as important as the
| coding genome.
|
| AFAIU, the later mostly encodes the structure of proteins,
| which naively are the factory machines of or cells (enzymes,
| that is) and some of its building blocks. The gene expression
| tells the factory what to produce (a tail or an ear, say), when
| to produce it, and how much. More relevant to the topic of this
| article, the gene expression would determine which structures
| and pathways of the brains (or adrenal glands, or any other
| organs) to suppress, and which to reinforce and build up in a
| new generation of humans.
|
| The building blocks are important, but once they are good
| enough, it matters more what you choose to build with them.
| ilyagr wrote:
| Perhaps what the grandparent meant is that we have little
| clue to how exactly any particular change in non-coding DNA
| actually affects the functioning of our minds and bodies, we
| have few tools to study that beyond the seemingly obvious
| fact that it does have to encode the structure of all the
| organs of our body and the fundamental structure of our
| brains somehow.
| TwoPhonesOneKid wrote:
| Surely any distinction bewtween ledgers is just as dumb at this
| point. Who gives a damn how the traits are passed down if that
| these traits are passed down is still a true statement of fact?
| lukas099 wrote:
| 'Course the epigenome affects the genome to via natural
| selection at the population level.
| rowanG077 wrote:
| It's also fun to see this marketed as generational trauma. Just
| because gene expression has changed does not mean that is
| equivalent as trauma.
| casey2 wrote:
| This is implied to me at least by "for generations"
|
| As in after x generations the genes "go back to normal"
| fjjjrjj wrote:
| Generational trauma is really hard to resolve. A therapist once
| told me "family systems don't like change." The really old family
| dynamics have a way of being passed down and reinforced. We
| settle into roles that perpetuate them.
|
| Interesting that there is not just social pressure but also
| genetic pressure that may be perpetuating the trauma.
|
| My grandfather drove a tank through Europe for the allies during
| WW2 and I know that is still impacting me and my kids. He self
| medicated his presumed PTSD with alcohol and died young before I
| was born. That impacted my father and the way he related to me.
| And I am sure it impacts how I relate to my kids too. I don't
| drink anymore because that history scares me. The rise in fascist
| and nationalist ideologies scares me too.
|
| If we forget history we are doomed to repeat it. Both at an
| individual and societal level.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| My grandfather also drank himself to death for similar reasons.
| What scares me is that as a society we forget too quickly the
| true cost and suffering caused by war.
| mywacaday wrote:
| A study of people who were adopted as babies could be
| interesting, depending on circumstances the stress on the birth
| mother could be reflected in the child but the dynamics of the
| birth family after birth would no longer be in play. I am
| specifically thinking of Ireland where there are a significant
| number of people in their 40s up that were the result of pretty
| much forced adoption due to the societal stigma of getting
| pregnant out of wedlock which would have been very stressful as
| the mothers were sent to mother and baby homes once they began
| to show.
| OnlyMortal wrote:
| I heard that, in the Netherlands after WW2, the descendants of
| people who starved were shorter in height even though they were
| born after the war.
|
| Admittedly this was from a Dr Karl podcast.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| It's in the article, and it's been overweight.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I saw a video about a study on Japanese villagers nearby seismic
| fault or volcanos. And IIRC the villagers facing the dangers
| directly had different tempers probably driven by the constant
| risks and traumas from past catastrophes, while the villagers
| further away and shielded by hills, were calmer.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| This doesn't require genetics or epigenetics to be the cause
| though. For example, there's also the possibility of stressed
| people passing their stress onto others through their actions.
| cheezeweezer wrote:
| Not exactly the "first human evidence of a phenomenon". There was
| an article published in 2013 about the 1836 potato famine.
| Descendants of those who experienced the famine first hand,
| expressed altered genome due to the stress.
|
| https://gizmodo.com/how-an-1836-famine-altered-the-genes-of-...
| jahewson wrote:
| Not genome. Epigenome.
| odyssey7 wrote:
| > The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into
| future generations should help people be more empathetic, help
| policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
|
| Alas, a new target for lasting, inter-generational psychological
| assault.
| paulnpace wrote:
| Meanwhile, in Gaza...
| lutusp wrote:
| "Passed down through their mothers, this genetic imprint offers
| the first human evidence of a phenomenon previously documented
| only in animals: The genetic transmission of stress across
| multiple generations."
|
| I wish reporters were required to research their claims.
|
| Apart from epigenetics, which influences offspring but confers no
| permanent genetic change, there is no inheritance of acquired
| traits. On this topic, for political reasons Joseph Stalin
| promoted Trofim Lysenko's incorrect views in this topic, which
| set Soviet genetics back decades. More here: "The destructive
| role of Trofim Lysenko in Russian Science"
| (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6777473/)
|
| Articles like this should at least explain how and why their
| claims differ from established genetic principles.
| dm319 wrote:
| Lots of people here stating that this is an epigenetic change
| rather than a change in the genetic sequence, which I think is
| missing the point somewhat.
|
| Epigenetic changes are an important part of your genetic make-up.
| To give you an example, the only reason that your skin cells
| remain your skin cells when they divide, and your liver cells
| remain your liver cells when they divide, is due to the
| epigenetic make up. Their DNA is the same, but the cells are very
| different, and epigenetics pass that information along when the
| code is copied.
|
| In the same way, these stress-related epigenetic changes are
| being copied down and inherited by the generation two under.
|
| This is already known, I think it was first seen in the Swedish
| famine cohort. At that time it was not clear it was due to
| epigenetics, but there was a clear signal in the health of those
| descendants [1], published here in 2002.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/5200859
| meew0 wrote:
| Reminds me of Scott Alexander's "GATTACA II: EPI-GATTACA":
| https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/19/the-gattaca-trilogy/
| _ink_ wrote:
| I have Aphantasia. I always wondered whether the physical and
| emotional violence my mother experienced increased the
| probability for it. I guess I'll never know, but it's interesting
| to see that epigenetics seems to be in play.
| mikeyinternews wrote:
| Dexter and his brother Brian are perfect examples of this
| dmitrygr wrote:
| > The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into
| future generations should help people be more empathetic, help
| policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
|
| This sounds like it was custom written perfectly to support
| censorshit. The usual "oh no... hurt feelings" stuff
| amountOfDoubt++;
| Necrondancer wrote:
| Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is mostly bogus. This
| research is usually invoked as an alternative to the much more
| straight-forward, easily verifiable influences of normie
| genetics. Since these are not deemed socially desirable, this
| epigenetic pseudoscience gets millions in funding.
|
| See:
| https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005heredita...
| imperialdrive wrote:
| Mind over matter. Don't forget to meditate, and try to keep the
| loop running in the background too.
| aaroninsf wrote:
| Research area that would be extremely interesting: whether and
| how epigenetic changes of this type correlated with social-
| political behavior and values.
| MrMcCall wrote:
| So why won't people listen to me that compassion for all human
| beings is the only excellent choice for us, both personally and
| in our cultures/societies/groups?
|
| The side that takes pleasure in the misery of others does so
| because the negative effects can be -- just as this title states
| -- deleterious for generations.
|
| We must evolve ourselves to, instead, sow the seeds of
| compassionate concern for all human beings to rid ourselves of
| the damaging effects of abuse of every kind, between any two
| people or groups of people.
|
| Yes, accomplishing any progress in that direction is
| fundamentally difficult because it goes against our animal
| physiology and negative potential, not to mention the even more
| generations of institutional pack mentality that so permeates our
| cultures' seeking of power.
|
| We could choose peace and compassion, if we chose to, but such a
| bold endeavor takes utter commitment and real work, for each and
| every one of us.
|
| Compassion is always the solution to _ALL_ our problems, because
| the lack of compassion is _ALWAYS_ the fundamental cause of
| _EACH_ and _EVERY_ one.
|
| It is both that simple, and that difficult, but it is also
| rewarding beyond normal comprension, for it is the most real kind
| of magic in this multiverse.
|
| "Love, baby, love." --Louis Armstrong
| ch4s3 wrote:
| For reference the underlying study is called " Epigenetic
| signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three
| generations of Syrian refugees"
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
| beebaween wrote:
| Do you know if there's also been similar research looking into
| the effects of victims of violence, specifically female rape
| victims? Having previously been married to a survivor of sexual
| violence in her teens, I hope similar work is being done to fully
| understand the gravity of these kinds of events on humans.
| Wistar wrote:
| In the mid-80s, I was dating someone who was studying genetics at
| Sac State. One day, I read an article that made the claim that a
| female dog that has been hit and injured by a car can later have
| puppies that are inherently afraid of cars. Although I didn't
| think about it with any rigor it seemed within the realm of
| possibility to me.
|
| I mentioned this to her and she *adamantly* refused to accept the
| possibility.
| dash2 wrote:
| I've published in genetics and been at conferences with
| epigenetics guys and honestly I came out with a low opinion of
| them. I saw a lot of poor work, p hacking with multiple indices,
| trawling etc.
|
| I just think common sense should make us suspicious of anything
| having deep heritable effects like this. There are obvious
| potential confounds here, it's not at all plausible that exposure
| to violence is random.
|
| See also the excellent https://www.razibkhan.com/p/you-cant-take-
| it-with-you-straig...
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