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Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

eurekalert.org

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Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#31

Post by thatcat »

davedx wrote: post #22
aluren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Most of what I've been taught after high school feels like "you've been lied to, everything you were taught in high school was wrong or grossly oversimplified and now you need to unlearn it all and relearn from scratch." Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place.

I got the same impression from people who studied chemistry after high school too though. Some things are just simplified so our children can ramp up their understanding gradually instead of having the wild complexity of the universe thrown at them in one go.

It makes no sense to leave things out of a description of a complex system to help someone to understand it better.

Have you considered educators might not want 17 year olds to understand things that are "too dangerous"? Because that happens at a pretty basic level in chemistry.

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#32

Post by aluren »

educationdata wrote: post #26
aluren wrote: post #6

>understandings of genes as immutable features of biology that are fixed at conception This 'understanding' has been known to be wrong for 30+ years now. Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc. are all things that exist and modulate information transfer beyond the standard four letters or the 'environment' (whatever people think it means) and we're still only scratching the surface.…

I still don't buy the "There is no nature vs. nurture" statement. Maybe there's more than nature vs. nurture, or more complicated than nature vs. nurture. But totally no nature vs. nurture? Overstatement.

Nature vs. nurture hasn't been a thing since the 2000's when second generation sequencing dramatically expanded the breadth of information we had about species' genomes and (along with other discoveries made at the time) made us realize there was indeed a lot more to it than this dichotomy. It's about as relevant in our modern understanding of genomics as the debate between GOTOs vs. structured programming is to our modern understanding of software engineering.

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#33

Post by mistermann »

johnchristopher wrote: post #25
aluren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Most of what I've been taught after high school feels like "you've been lied to, everything you were taught in high school was wrong or grossly oversimplified and now you need to unlearn it all and relearn from scratch." Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place.

> Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place. Oh, I have an opinion about that: Well. First and above all the first purpose of school and high school is to learn to follow authority (edit: authority in every other meanings. Tthe first authority to submit oneself to is the school). This is the first brick and if it's not assimilated in a way that suits the school the student will get throw…

This would also explain why we don't teach fundamentals of epistemology or critical thinking, even though we constantly read in the news how crucially important these skills are, because of fake news and Russian election hackers.

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#34

Post by aeorgnoieang »

aluren wrote: post #6

>understandings of genes as immutable features of biology that are fixed at conception This 'understanding' has been known to be wrong for 30+ years now. Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc. are all things that exist and modulate information transfer beyond the standard four letters or the 'environment' (whatever people think it means) and we're still only scratching the surface.…

> DNA is not source code

My, admittedly weak, understanding is that the analogy is (much) more apt than not. Sure, the means by which that code is 'compiled' and 'executed' is much different than in the computers we've built, but, for one, DNA, genes, chromosomes, and all of the other various levels of organization of those units of information seem to be remarkably, amazingly stable, for many (most? almost all?) organisms, which seems to strongly imply that 'DNA is source code' is about as true as 'Earth is a sphere'. Sure, they're both only approximately true, but how approximately they're true (or not) is very important. Asimov explained this extremely well:

- [Asimov - The Relativity of Wrong](http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm)

'Epigenetics' itself seems like it might not be a particular thing among different people:

- [The misunderstanding of epigenetics – Insitome](https://blog.insito.me/the-misunderstanding-of-epigenetics-a...)

What epigenetics is not is anything like Lamarckian inheritance, at least not at all to the same degree.

> Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc. are all things that exist and modulate information transfer beyond the standard four letters or the 'environment' (whatever people think it means) and we're still only scratching the surface.

Sure, but that doesn't mean that the central dogma of biology is entirely wrong, just that it's not always and everywhere true exactly. The current best understanding of epigenetics (quoted from my second link above) is that, whatever it is, it is such that:

> very little of [genetic] inheritance is perturbed by epigenetic effects

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#35

Post by iguy »

thatcat wrote: post #31
davedx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got the same impression from people who studied chemistry after high school too though. Some things are just simplified so our children can ramp up their understanding gradually instead of having the wild complexity of the universe thrown at them in one go.

It makes no sense to leave things out of a description of a complex system to help someone to understand it better. Have you considered educators might not want 17 year olds to understand things that are "too dangerous"? Because that happens at a pretty basic level in chemistry.

Actually, leaving things out of a description of a complex system is the only reason we can ever understand anything!

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#36

Post by amelius »

aeorgnoieang wrote: post #34
aluren wrote: post #6

>understandings of genes as immutable features of biology that are fixed at conception This 'understanding' has been known to be wrong for 30+ years now. Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc. are all things that exist and modulate information transfer beyond the standard four letters or the 'environment' (whatever people think it means) and we're still only scratching the surface.…

> DNA is not source code My, admittedly weak, understanding is that the analogy is (much) more apt than not. Sure, the means by which that code is 'compiled' and 'executed' is much different than in the computers we've built, but, for one, DNA, genes, chromosomes, and all of the other various levels of organization of those units of information seem to be remarkably, amazingly stable, for many (most? almost all?) org…

To test how much this corresponds to reality, has someone cloned an organism yet with entirely synthetic DNA material?

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#37

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

johnchristopher wrote: post #25
aluren wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Most of what I've been taught after high school feels like "you've been lied to, everything you were taught in high school was wrong or grossly oversimplified and now you need to unlearn it all and relearn from scratch." Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place.

> Makes you wonder what the purpose of high school was in the first place. Oh, I have an opinion about that: Well. First and above all the first purpose of school and high school is to learn to follow authority (edit: authority in every other meanings. Tthe first authority to submit oneself to is the school). This is the first brick and if it's not assimilated in a way that suits the school the student will get throw…

> The first purpose of school and high school is to learn to follow authority.

I think that depends which person at the school you ask. I am married to a low-income neighborhood high school English teacher and we talk curriculum often. Seems to me that it's about striking a balance: One side is what you said, the other side is teaching students to unite against that authority in productive ways.

Too far in one direction, and you wind up with a society where none of the competent people you know have enough faith in the system to run for office. Too far in the other direction and the dominant class sees the everyone else as a threat and puts walls up.

It's a difficult balance to strike, but I know a lot of teachers that work very hard at finding it.

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#38

Post by rdiddly »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #19
aluren wrote: post #6

>understandings of genes as immutable features of biology that are fixed at conception This 'understanding' has been known to be wrong for 30+ years now. Rearrangements, microchimerism, epigenetics, chromosome organization etc. are all things that exist and modulate information transfer beyond the standard four letters or the 'environment' (whatever people think it means) and we're still only scratching the surface.…

>> DNA is not source code It is source code, it's just that source code is self-modifying.

Maybe you could say it's source code, but there are many contributors with 'pull' privileges? :)

Re: Poverty leaves a mark on our genes

#40

Post by dang »

conse_lad wrote: post #2

Same story shared one day ago. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20190233

Reposts are fine if a story hasn't had significant attention yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

It's good to share links to previous threads, but only if there's actually a discussion there.

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