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Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

elifesciences.org

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Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#91
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t really see that as anti-Darwinian. Those genes successfully attach themselves to a new organism and provide advantages such that they are selected for in the population.

The selection is classical, but the mutations are supposed to be random, not skewed towards more useful genetic variants. One can speculate that a purely random (and otherwise neutral, say) prior mutation led to this directionality, but the actual resulting mechanism is AFAIK still unknown.

I don't think Darwin himself said anything about the randomness of the mutations, and of course was not aware of DNA and how things were encoded. I guess followers of Darwin may have said all sorts of things but the paper doesn't seem to contradict Darwinian evolution as described by Darwin.

I see the paper says "central tenet of neo-Darwinism that mutations are random...". I'm not that up on neo-Darwinism whatever it is.

(I looked at Wikipedia and it seems neo-Darwinism is the term for the Darwin like thinking of the time so maybe the paper contradicts last years neo-Darwinism but not next years?)

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#92
post #78
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a scientist with about four published papers in genetics - not a geneticist myself, but I coauthor. I'm simply reporting my experience with the field.

human gene regulation is dependent on methylation events and acetylation events, as well as conformal events with respect to the strand. there is no meiotic reset to default. you should hang with some oncogeneticists for fresh perspective.

> there is no meiotic reset to default.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprogramming

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#93
post #35

Epigenetics is one of those things that seems wild until you pull the camera back a bit. A cell is affected by and responds to its surroundings - this is not controversial. In eukaryotes, this is usually done by way of altering gene expression - up- or down-regulation by means of chemical markers on the cell’s DNA which are created or removed by enzymes which are activated or deactivated by certain substances in the…

Great writeup! And as someone less knowledgeable about biological sciences than others, I think learned even more from your disclaimers! p.s. If you know any good sources for adults to catch up on some biology basics, let me know.

I had similar question ... based on a hint @DoctorOetker gave in his comments, e.g., system biology, etc., searched the web and found quite a few good starting references with https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~brunos/Lecture1.pdf, https://www.math.uwaterloo.ca/~bingalls/MMSB/Notes.pdf, https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/id/d9e017e0-d794-4cbb-b7... being some of them.

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#94
In God's Word (Bible), we see hints of human epigenetics. There's also a strong theology of how our behavior influences our children's. Atheists and individualists strongly opposed this until it was largely pushed out of mainstream consciousness. I believe that caused a lot of damage because sins that could damage one's children or society for generations are downplayed as personal flaws or choices with limited effect.

"The LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, “The LORD! The LORD, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abundant in loving kindness and truth, keeping loving kindness for thousands, forgiving iniquity and disobedience and sin; and who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the children’s children, on the third and on the fourth generation." (Exodus 34:6-7)

His wrath often works by simply letting us have the consequences of sinful choices. Examples I've encountered include wreckless driving putting a person's head into a tree, sexual immorality leading to STD's, and greed leading managers to break people's bodies in.the workplace. What jumped out at me here was three or four generations. Would there be a natural explanation for that?

From there, one would look for two things: whether behavior can be passed down at all; whether behavior can change things, like DNA, that are passed down.

On the first, there are sins that seem to move across families. Anecdotally, I've found this is often true even when the child hated that behavior in their parents which should reduce its recurrence. (I'd like empirical data on that.) Tue best evidence was that identical twins seperated at birth also had a startling amount of similar behaviors, down to names they liked. So, we do pass behavior down which has implications for individuals, future parents, and using or evaluating sperm/egg donors.

The other issue is whether one's choices can change DNA. An underlying premise would be whether or not environmental effects can chnage DNA. Stressors like famine or toxic chemicals were confirmed to do this. Both are often caused by sins, like not taking care of one's body or others' greed (eg ruthless capitalism). There's some evidence lifestyle choices can do this, too. I saw one study showing a mechanism for how behavior is transmitted in men which the Bible night imply by putting it on Adam and his bloodline. Those studies need more replication and validation, though.

The last thing was that many countries got worse and worse over time. The specific sins increased until everyone, from adults to children, only did evil. God ordered Israel to wipe out entire people groups, even the children, while listing the sins they committed (including burning their children alive). As I try to understand the morality of it, it would make more sense if our behavior is passed down genetically because some groups could be corrupted beyond all repair. In fact, sparing just one kid later led to Haman in Xerxes' Persia nearly killing all Jews because that bloodline passed its hate and habits down.

So, the data in the long-term has heavily supported the Biblical positions that (a) behavior is passed down, (b) godless, selfish worldviews wreck countries down to the genetic level, (c) it can get to a point of no return, (d) individual choices can reduce or reverse this in large enough numbers, and (e) we therefore should repent and follow Jesus Christ and His Word as a country to receive the blessings, supernatural and natural, that come with it.

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#95
post #35

Epigenetics is one of those things that seems wild until you pull the camera back a bit. A cell is affected by and responds to its surroundings - this is not controversial. In eukaryotes, this is usually done by way of altering gene expression - up- or down-regulation by means of chemical markers on the cell’s DNA which are created or removed by enzymes which are activated or deactivated by certain substances in the…

For whatever reason, epigenetics is somehow considered by a great many people to be some whackadoodle conspiracy theorist woo-woo. When I posit the following explanation-question that helped me to understand at least that epigenetics does akshually come from science, either the light bulb goes on over one's head or it's seething hate: How come all of the cells in our bodies have the same DNA, but they can be so diffe…

Cells specialize based on the presence of certain chemical gradients, for example. These types of 'signals' that guide specialization already become apparent in a very early stage of embryonic development. I don't think that's part of the realm of epigenetics.

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#96
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has been aruably a more serious blow to the pure Darwinian evolution (this is all epigenetics, after all): non-random occurrence of useful mutations in populations exposed to particular diseases. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40854136/

It's clear that purely random mutations don't work in the sense that an infinite number of monkeys won't produce Shakespeare even if you kill of the monkeys that fail.

I'm not sure of the maths there. The number of letter permutations of a Shakespeare play is ~10^400000 and infinity is bigger than that. Though you might have a job feeding the monkeys.

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#97
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For whatever reason, epigenetics is somehow considered by a great many people to be some whackadoodle conspiracy theorist woo-woo. When I posit the following explanation-question that helped me to understand at least that epigenetics does akshually come from science, either the light bulb goes on over one's head or it's seething hate: How come all of the cells in our bodies have the same DNA, but they can be so diffe…

Cells specialize based on the presence of certain chemical gradients, for example. These types of 'signals' that guide specialization already become apparent in a very early stage of embryonic development. I don't think that's part of the realm of epigenetics.

I read it in a book called The Epigenetics Revolution, so I'm going to stick with what the author wrote there.

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#98
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does meiosis involve a reset mechanism of any kind?

The reset happens in the days following fertilization. Pretty much 100% of human DNA gets demethylated then.

1) epigenetic inheritance is just if a horse stretches its neck to reach up high, so to do that horses children and their children, and so on, until you end up with a giraffe

2) yes methylation and epigenetics resets, not so much at meiosis as at conception zygote formation

3) it doesn't 100% reset more like 98.3% resets, the remainder does NOT reset, thus, epigenetic inheritance. Sometimes that reset process fails, thusly, (epi)genetic disease. Also all this process called "imprinting" is why it was hard to clone various organisms including until recently humans - you can "reset" a skin cell 100% but that's not the ticket, you need to reset it 98.3% and leave the imprinting regions. Oh. And the specific imprinting regions are different for the chromosome that come from mom, vs, the chromosome come from dad

So the big takeaway is that DNA no longer is the main mechanism of inheritance as Darwin taught but actually epigenetic, and the basis is along the lines of horses stretching their necks and becoming giraffes. There's a lot of getting into the weeds as to how this all works molecularly is that's it's really complicated but it is inherited

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#99

Honest question: isn’t all inheritance transgenerational?

No, you may have certain inheritance mechanisms that can only last for one or two generations. This is typically related to the fact that female mammals are born with all of the egg cells that they will ever have. So, any direct stressor applied to the mother during her life could affect her children & grandchildren (intergenerational), but it won't affect subsequent generations (transgenerational).

The way this can work is that stressors to the mother's organism can affect the development of children, especially stressors to a pregnant mother - so transmission to the next generation is clear (e.g. a starving pregnant mother may have more sickly children). Then, for daughters, their eggs may be directly impacted by this stressor, so that their own children, which come from those egged, may be impacted. However, these children won't carry any trace of that stressor, unless it is genetic in nature.

Re: Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance: the story of learned avoidance

#100

In God's Word (Bible), we see hints of human epigenetics. There's also a strong theology of how our behavior influences our children's. Atheists and individualists strongly opposed this until it was largely pushed out of mainstream consciousness. I believe that caused a lot of damage because sins that could damage one's children or society for generations are downplayed as personal flaws or choices with limited effec…

> God ordered Israel to wipe out entire people groups, even the children, while listing the sins they committed (including burning their children alive). As I try to understand the morality of it, it would make more sense if our behavior is passed down genetically because some groups could be corrupted beyond all repair. In fact, sparing just one kid later led to Haman in Xerxes' Persia nearly killing all Jews because that bloodline passed its hate and habits down.

Wonderful, trying to justify the evil, bloody, genocidal, murderous god of the Old Testament with modern pseudo-science - and coming from a Christian, apparently. The religion of love and peace, of course, not like all of those other barbarians.

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