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Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

quantamagazine.org

41–50 of 196 posts

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#41
post #16

assuming this is true, perhaps it's best to freeze sperm regularly with labels that way if you go off the deep end you can snapshot quite literally your best self? some possible times - right before college, right after college, after you meet someone you think you'd marry (but before you do), after marriage. seems like a neat premise for a sci fi novella.

If my quicksave/quickload savescumming is to be observed, I’d be pining for that sperm from before I told the waitress “you too” wrt to her telling me to enjoy my meal.

> savescumming

Savecumming?

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#42
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If my quicksave/quickload savescumming is to be observed, I’d be pining for that sperm from before I told the waitress “you too” wrt to her telling me to enjoy my meal.

> I told the waitress “you too” wrt to her telling me to enjoy my meal. That's not too bad unless you are in a group and they make fun of you right away, but it's a fumble that you can fix and start a good play if you don't just get super nervous. Laugh it off, ask her if it's not the first one, ask her to join, even if you know she's actually working and can't. I've never done any improv, but it seems like something…

Nah just yell “switcheroo!” then grab her outfit and suddenly you're the waitress and she’s the diner with a meal to enjoy.

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#43
post #24

> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well. queue rationalist fathers microdosing nicotine patches before conception to give their kids the best chance at abusing drugs.

What does disarming mean here? I wound read it as “the drug has less effect” - so in that case you can better abuse these drugs if you are worse at “disarming” them I guess

perhaps "making less harmful to the body"? this could potentially be accomplished separately from making them less effective

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#44

assuming this is true, perhaps it's best to freeze sperm regularly with labels that way if you go off the deep end you can snapshot quite literally your best self? some possible times - right before college, right after college, after you meet someone you think you'd marry (but before you do), after marriage. seems like a neat premise for a sci fi novella.

I think trying to "tune" your kids in any way is asking to be disappointed. My three kids could not be more different and they all have the same mother, grew up in the same house, etc. If "microRNA" profiles have any influence, I would wager it's very small.

> they all have the same mother, grew up in the same house, etc.

I’m pretty sure the first one didn’t have siblings, and the second only had one. Also their mother is not the same person after raising the first kid, or raising two.

Parenting never have reproducible conditions.

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know that severe stress (such as trauma) leaves chemical marks on the genes, potentially passed down to the offspring. For example, this paper writes about an “accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5977074/ Though “lived experience” can encompass a lot of things, it definitely encompasses seve…

The comment you’re replying to suggests “lived experience” is too broad, not too narrow. The issue isn’t that it fails to include your example. It fails to exclude other things. Part of my lived experience today was seeing a manatee. It is unlikely this will be passed on.

It feels so wonderfully weird reading about some else seeing a manatee today. I too saw a manatee while walking with my kids today. The interesting part was our navigational strategies complementing each other (me – misremembering the details of a road closure, and them - getting curious about what a bunch of people at a marina are looking at) to find a group of manatees in a place we didn’t know they can be found.

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#47
post #7

Lamarck has entered the chat

I see you being downvoted, but it's a good quip. Lamarckian vs. Mendelian genetics was about heritable traits being acquired in life (Lamarck), or being discrete units passed down at conception (Mendel). Genetics is almost entirely Mendelian, but some of epigenetics is durable and thus Lamarckian. There's also retroviral integrations, transposons, and all sorts of other complexities that don't fit neatly into boxes.

The dirty little secret is that there is an incredible ideological incentive for many for Lamarckianism to be true so that they can blame “lived experience” for every ill in the world. Retroviruses, transposons, etc do not have that specific property and thus you see far fewer articles extolling their purported impacts.

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#48
"researchers, including those spearheading the work, are cautious about overselling their results"

Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.

I write this here because science does not really work well when it is based on speculation. So this article is weird. It starts by speculating about something rather than analyse the article. It then continues to "textbooks have to be rewritten". Well, I think if you are in science, you need to demonstrate that all your claims made need to be correct - and others can verify it, without any restriction whatsoever.

> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,” Conine said.

So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.

There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.

See this article:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258

It was later redacted - a total fabrication. A lie.

Re: Fathers’ choices may be packaged and passed down in sperm RNA

#49
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me wonder if that's some of the influence that different siblings get? The first born gets more ambition, the middle child chills, and the baby acts like a boomer. jk. Honestly, sounds like a great read!

Adding "jk" after a casual prejudiced insult to a demographic doesn't undo the prejudiced insult.

Please tell me you’re joking.
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