> “This study shows that paternal exercise can confer benefits — enhanced endurance and metabolic health — to offspring,”
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
But that's not what it says. RNA fragments are entering the ovum and having some sort of effect .... that's quite different from passing traits the way genes on chromosomes do.
Some trees have mechanisms, for instance, where they die quickly but signal other trees if exposed to certain issues, allowing the other trees to put up a better defense.
Ants and other insects sometimes do the same thing.
the section immediately after that you didn’t quote:
> evidence keeps piling up. Most recently, in November 2025, a comprehensive paper (opens a new tab) published in Cell Metabolism traced the downstream molecular effects of a father mouse’s exercise regimen on sperm microRNAs that target genes “critical for mitochondrial function and metabolic control” in a developing embryo. The researchers found many of those same RNAs overexpressed in the sperm of well-exercised human men.
I and others generally don't quote things that aren't relevant to the point we're making and I'm not keen on the crypt-accusation. I didn't say that there aren't downstream molecular effects--clearly there are. Rather, the article is very unclear about the nature of epigenetics, and the wording about "transmitting traits" is misleading at best and leads to many unwarranted conclusions, as evidenced in the comments here. The statements I quoted are not about transmitting traits. e.g., "paternal exercise" refers to a trait of exercising, taking time to exercise, being motivated to exercise, etc. The "conferred benefit" of "enhanced endurance and metabolic health" is a different trait. If that is the trait being transmitted then that should be the trait being identified in male parents, not "exercise". Similarly, being exposed to nicotine is not the trait of having livers that are good at "disarming" nicotine, cocaine, and a host of other toxins ... and this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and the article provides one citation, from 2017.
And as an epigeneticist says in the article, we have no idea how RNA is having the effects its having.
As I said, I'm happy to wait until we have moved beyond this early stage of research before making any radical inferences.
In the “paternal exercise” case the trait isn’t the habit of exercising, it’s the metabolic changes of exercise that are (apparently) conferred to both father and offspring.
You're completely missing the point that I explicitly stated. The trait that is purportedly being transmitted is metabolic changes that confer some advantage, but that's not what's being measured in the father, "exercise" is--not a word was said about fathers having better metabolic health, just that they "exercise". Which is reason to be skeptical of the claim.
Have you considered that checking for that specifically might not be actually needed? After all, the correlation between exercise and metabolic health is well established.
That was my original thought, however if you want to quantify an effect it would be ideal to measure the same trait in both parent and offspring. I assume that the reason that this was done (I didn’t read the papers) is because this is a retrospective study, where the participants self-report on the exercise level of their fathers, rather than a longitudinal study which could measure the fathers’ metabolic state fitness at time of conception.
Thus, although there is a plausible link, I now agree with the parent post that this is sufficient reason to take the study with a grain of salt (given well known academic incentives to produce positive results, etc).
Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
> The point is that people are drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this lay report on early stage research.
That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."
I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
I agree. The example with Nicotine intake having a somewhat positive effect on the children feels too wild at the money. Think of all the kids of the 60th and 70th. They must be immune to most toxins ;). Yes I take this example to the extreme. I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory. Why would it take so long for a given treat to establish itself. Maybe I mix too much into one bag after reading this one article.
>I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory.
It doesn't, but the article doesn't go into this detail, so people unfamiliar with the field wouldn't understand why. The keyword is epigenetics. I.e. how certain genes become activated or deactivated through behaviour and/or environmental influences. But the DNA sequence itself remains unaltered. So no evolution necessary. There are basically a bunch of molecules than sit on top of your DNA that regulate gene expression. They don't just tell a cell to behave like a skin cell or a brain cell, they also regulate the entire cellular metabolism. The discovery that male sperm can also transmit this epigenetic information to offspring is relatively new, but now that we know that, it makes total sense that these gene-expression-modifying behaviours in fathers could affect their children. After all, they simply get to start with a good (or bad) bunch of epigenetic markers. They will not persist across many generations though, so it has no real long term effect on evolution. It may even be an evolved mechanism that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes on timeframes that would be prohibited by evolution.
Not all epigenetics is regulation of gene expression. The article says "these molecules transmit traits to offspring and that they can regulate embryonic development after fertilization" -- that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate--it certainly isn't true in the way that genes express traits. And then they quote an actual epigeneticist saying
“We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part”
>that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate
It is pretty accurate, even if we don't understand all details yet. Here's a review article of the current research that's not from a popsci journalist: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37820-2
> ”They will not persist across many generations though”
Why not? Is there some tempering mechanism on epigenetic transfer? I could imagine that some sperm-conferred epigenetic markers could continue down the male descendants unbroken.
If I understand both correctly, a better answer to your question than sibling post is that yes, that could be imagined, but your dichotomy is not mutually exclusive, and the process described here is much more related to variable conditions of the environment and the parents’ health at the time of conception rather than to the replicable genetic structures.
Speaking mostly from personal experience here, if a kid gets a suped-up liver from their dad's smoking habits, cool. But how many kids fathers stopped smoking when the kid was born? My point, the father's smoking habits may have passed down a strong liver but his continued use damaged the child's lungs and possibly more.
These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.
If true, I suppose there is also a opportunity cost involved. Meaning selecting for better coping with nicotine, does not help selecting for smarter offspring and maybe even preventing that. So it might be somewhat positive but at a cost unknown.
Also there are the very known costs of nicotine damaging sperms, or of course being in literal smoke as a child (or adult) and deal with those real effects.
>Think of all the kids of the 60th and 70th. They must be immune to most toxins ;).
60th and 70th what?? :)
But seriously though, "immune" is a humorous exaggeration, but I'm not sure we have data to rule out the idea that this cohort has increased tolerance to some environmental toxins.
So it's possible the level of harm we see today is already "post-" this protective effect, if any.
I figured, just a joke playing off their typo (hence the smiley).
There were plenty of non-"drug" toxins people were exposed to where levels peaked around that time — leaded gasoline, early food contact plastics with unsafe additives, pesticides that are now banned, etc. But thanks Nancy Reagan. ;)
I certainly didn't; I simply quoted a sentence from the article. (I've noticed that some people have difficulty distinguishing between the person who quotes something and the person being quoted ... it might be a Sally-Anne effect.)
> It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
> nicotine is significantly more harmful than caffeine
“Significantly” is an opinion.
It’s more toxic by weight, yes.
Messes with vascular more than caffeine.
Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
> let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
Personally haven’t needed or wanted to use nicotine, but I have recovered from an array of chronic illnesses; I’ll get started on anything I please, thanks,
especially seeing how many of my peers are hopelessly exhausted and existing on abusive amounts of caffeine/prescription stimulants to get by.
> Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
Plain black coffee has, somewhat surprisingly, been repeatedly demonstrated to be very healthy - with substantial reductions in all-cause mortality as well as the chances of developing cardiovascular disease. I tend to live somewhat spartanly in terms of consumption, and wanted to drop my coffee habit which looks something like this [1], but looking up the data on it left me dropping that idea real fast.
does your opinion cover patents who have blood test results showing Lyme, and one or more known coinfections like Bab, Bart, (all known, and treatable bacterial infections),
although it's like milk too. exposure at an early age leads to the body producing more lactase enzyme to digest it. but lack of exposure often makes people lactose intolerant.
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.
Nobel prize might be waiting for two sets of octomom same-egg offspring with compatible genders that join together to have n=8 firstborn children which are conceived at same date under the same conditions (no alcohol, no ongoing infections, etc.), and the pregnancy period is spent together.
It will definitely need 8 scientist relationships, a lot of energy and money.
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.
I’m a twin - admittedly boy/girl, so already with some fundamental differences - and we are very, very different people. Always have been. Different interests, different ways of seeing the world, different attitudes to competition, sports, social relationships etc.
Now I’ve got 2 boys, and even at fairly young ages they were very different. I’d say by 6 months old the basics of their personalities were visible, and they haven’t changed vastly as they’ve grown.
The twins I have known are the same. I would assume it has something to do with a desire to differentiate themselves from one another, but they always seemed far more dissimilar in personality and affect than my siblings.
OTOH could be siblings tend to be more similar as the smaller ones try to copy the older ones (my son would dress up as a ballerina to play with his sister when he was little, my smaller brother would acquiesce to play chess with me just to spend time together etc).
I have given up trying to explain child development, there's just too many variables.
An adjacent point but despite ubiquitous birth order superstitions quality literature consensus seems to be that birth order is not a large driver of predictable differences. Example:
Agree, those are some environmental differences. But any "microRNA" profile I might have contributed to the conception of each would be broadly similar. My life was pretty stable and levels of stress, diet, exercise, etc. were all about the same for all three.
> 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?
Then you'll probably have kids who resemble Wim Hof
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 maybe everyone should do so we all can avoid awkward moments that stick for way longer than they should.
Slang term for frequently reloading game state from recent save when a non-ideal outcome occurs. E.g. this method can be used to collect rare outcomes from a RNG-based game event.
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.
Insulting yourself might have been your intent, but what you wrote is just a general ageist insult. It's like you when you fail something, and you make a racist analogy. You might want to insult yourself, you might think you are insulting yourself, but you are just racist.
It was a self-deprecating joke which back-fired because nuance is lost on the internet. You got triggered, which is entirely human, but at this point, you're the one who is doubling down. Perhaps it's a good time to disconnect and enjoy some time with your family.
I didn't "down" in the first place, but "no you" is typical of your ilk. Your comment is dishonest denial of your ageist bigotry, an inability to take responsibility for your actions. And I don't take life advice from trolls, bigots, and the like.
I get that saying “boomer ruined the world for all the generations afterwards” is an insult, but the word itself is now considered an insult?
Genuinely asking here; the constantly shifting landscape of what one is allowed to say when talking to US Americans is a bit hard for me to navigate and I currently only have online discourse as guidepost (which is like 1000% more toxic)
Your question is disingenuous, as the word "boomer" didn't appear isolated with no context. The statement was "the baby acts like a boomer", which clearly has a pejorative connotation--you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here? The babies/third children?" ... it's not even possible to think that babies are being insulted without thinking that saying they're like boomers is insulting. As I said, that seems to be an unquestioned assumption.
As I said elsewhere, there is no single way that boomers behave. Boomers are simply people born in the post-war boom, from 1946-1964, and they display a huge range of traits. Virtually all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative--ageist bigotry.
> what one is allowed to say
This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
How does “the baby acts like a boomer” have negative connotations?
Sounds like you are personally offended that the word “boomer” exists and projecting here.
> you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here
I asked this because boomer was the only possible demographic in GPs post, not because I think the term boomer is pejorative in itself. Chilling and ambition are obviously not demographics but qualities.
> This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
If you want to go there, this argument is bad faith as well… of course I can say anything, but you seem to be personally offended that the term boomer exists and I simply don’t understand why.
> all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative
Is that true for every other age group, so for example is every statement that refers to “millennials” or “zoomers” automatically pejorative and ageist?
> Virtually all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative--ageist bigotry.
It's not ageist to have complaints against a specific generation, not the one before, not the one after, with those complaints sticking to that generation as their age changes.
(Whether those complaints are right or wrong on a statistical level is a different issue.)
Fine, it's some other sort of stupid ignorant intellectually dishonest bigotry. (Most of the people who get attacked as boomers are actually in the generation before them.)
> Whether those complaints are right or wrong on a statistical level is a different issue.
Only because you have made it one. The word "ageist" was the least part of my comment (but there is in fact a strong ageist element to the pejorative use of the term, contrary to your mischaracterization of the realities of its use ... notably, the people who use it are younger, never older, and have not used it throughout time--they couldn't, as they weren't even born when boomers arrived on the scene and for decades afterwards).
> 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.
"Hard headed", "not a cheap date", "not a lightweight"? Hard to say if increased tolerance is good or bad (especially if we're uncertain about how addictiveness/susceptibility to addictive behavior it passed)
Damn. I didn't start substance abuse until after all my children were sired. Apparently I have done them an injustice by compromising their resistance to cocaine and other toxins. I have failed as a father!
In the article, there's a link in the text right before they put that parenthetical. I'm guessing they're saying that the link interested them so they clicked it to read but opened it in a new tab so they could finish the current article first.
Someone who works out every day will obviously have different metabolic and microRNA profiles; assuming that line of research holds up and those biomolecular profiles make it into the zygote, survive many replication cycles, and act as developmental signalling molecules affecting gene expression during embryonic and fetal development, there could be life-long effects.
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.
For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
> Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed.
While there is absolutely no conclusive evidence, there are a few studies that indicate this is a possibility.
But if, evolutionarily, there are only 20 common recurring threats that you need to fear (but each comes at some kind of cost, like you won't hunt in an area that would otherwise provide food), it would make sense to pass on those fears in a generational way. So the possible things come from a preset list that has evolved over millions of years, that recur over and over but only in specific times and places.
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 severe stress.
For example, constantly worrying about money because you’re poor can definitely put you under severe stress. Also, growing up without secure attachment to your caretakers, being asked to do role reversal (having to take care of your parents as a child), things like that will generate complex PTSD.
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.
And the comment you’re replying to suggests that since many lived experiences are plausibly heritable, the term is appropriate. In any case, the context in which it is actually used in the article seems beyond all but the most pedantic reproach:
>The first is how a father’s body physically encodes lived experience, such as stress, diet, exercise or nicotine use
And that’s a single sentence partway through the article. From the beginning, the refrain is the list of the sorts of things that seem to have heritable effect, not the phrase “lived experiences”.
>Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children
>Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring
Etc.
The article is clearly not attempting to suggest that all experiences are heritable.
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.
A lot of this is transmitted via the language. The stories we form as a result of events in our lives, have power to set our values in all areas. These myths of the self, have what is essentially a value manifest for someone. And these myths, can be so strongly held that it will influence the person and family’s moods, actions, habits.
What is important is to note that there are many formulas for consciousness. Some are truely bonkers, some are just fundamental truth. And some… have yet to be discovered.
Permutations and combinatorics create a hyperspace of all ridiculous things!
> The authors pointed out “there are significant drawbacks in the existing human literature” including “lack of longitudinal studies, methodological heterogeneity, selection of tissue type, and the influence of developmental stage and trauma type on methylation outcomes”
The literature in this area is a mess, has become highly politicized. I’d give it another 10 or so years before I made any strong statements about these effects in humans. Famously the study of Holocaust survivors’ descendants didn’t show transgenerational effects.
> “It’s still very hand-wavy,” said the epigeneticist Colin Conine (opens a new tab) of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
okay, I trust this article and source more
where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
Is this not the basis of epigenetics? Don’t we already have human-based examples?
While I don’t recall the details there was an example of how starvation (of eventual parents) during WW II impacted the children. There is also, a similar example of how the effects of diet was passed along during The Great Depression.
Maybe we should stop viewing DNA as source code or I guess more importantly as the sole source of heritability. It's clear that parts of DNA are somehow variably expressed. Different sections of DNA are "unrolled" depending on how you live your life, and unrolled DNA is part of an entire complex. Now it seems parts of that complex are heritable.
It makes a kind of intuitive sense to me. Given I have no real understanding of the topic. Perfect click bait to get me to feel smart waxing intellectual on the toilet.
It’s interesting to think this information being passed is something like “Heads up. This dude does a lot of exercise which means it must be crucial to survival wherever we are.”
I can imagine how difficult it would be to differentiate between nature and nurture in such human observations. An exercising vs smoking parent affects the child because of his RNA or his behaviour? Identical twins studies have their limitations in number of participants.
"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.
> So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
I hard disagree. Your comment to me reads as if a paper should either prove a new theory or disprove an existing theory.
However, publishing new results without a clear understanding of how it works is just as valid and this seems to be that. In Phsyics and Astronomy, new observations are often published without a theory of how it works. This is not a bad thing, that is part of the collaborative nature of science. The same holds true for papers suggesting a new theory, but lacking either observational or theoretical proof.
These flaws aren't failings of the article, but univeral to science, knowledge, and human endeavor:
> 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.
This describes all science and all knowledge; if that's not good enough, nothing is good enough. Everything somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect; the best stuff is much more of the former. Newton's Laws are mostly correct, somewhat incorrect.
> science does not really work well when it is based on speculation
Speculation is the foundation of science: it leads to an hypothesis, which leads to research, which leads to more speculation.
> their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
That also is the nature of all science. For example, papers include analyses of their own blind spots and weaknesses, and end with suggestions for further research by others.
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
That's also part of science and all human endeavor. If you disallow that, we might as well go back to being illiterate - everything we read is flawed, and inevitably some is wrong.
There is plenty of room in science for research that is just to examine and collect data. I don't understand your argument that science should only be to demonstrate claims and "completing" theories. Is science not about experimenting to slowly form a more complete understanding about how our world works? Research that does little more than collect novel data and show probable correlations is still extremely valuable.
Detecting an effect is present is separate from effect power and mechanism. Showing an effect is present is usually the first step before the other two.
> 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 don't understand your criticism.
It makes complete sense that the researchers are worried about the research being oversold. It's routine for media to take a scientific finding and grossly exaggerate its impact, i.e. "New research proves you can exercise your way to a fit child" or whatever.
This is science, we don't know if anything is "correct." The more compelling the research, the more we can adjust our priors as to what is "correct."
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
There are also lots of examples where theories were later not shown to be wrong. What's your point?
Do you have an actual, concrete criticism of the methodology of the epigentic research in TFA, or are your just bloviating?
Prior to them, I didnt think that behaviour or traits are inheritable.
When one of them was aronud 3 or 3.5, I observed an interesting behaviour:
It was about the meal, which contained fries - and ketchup.
He saw that the ketchup was flowing slowly towards the fries and reached there finally - he became funnily hectict, trying to prevent even more ketchup touching the fries.
Today I think he behaved that way ... because ... on my plate which fries & ketchup ... if this happens ... then ... you know :-D :-D :-D :-D
It drives me nuts, really - if I am at a restaurant, I ask always for separte plates for things which are fried, because I love the crust and it gets destroyed if any type of gravy is scattered around the plate :-D
Or maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-D
But what I can clearly see, is: In their body shape I can see that their mother and I were super-fit-in-shape when they were "created".
You mean that we showed them already by that age to not mix fries & ketchup? :-D
If children are that small and you are sitting with two of them at the table, handing over those ideas to them in a "nurturing way" is the last thing on what you can focus on with two small kids at the table :-))
And its always great if someone gives a downvote here if you share some personal life stories :-D
I think its interesting that in the "rationalist" latter half of the 20th century Freud began to be dismissed at least in part on account of his elective affinity with Lamarck; now, it is clear that certain environmental and social factors have an influence on offspring at the genomic level from both parents.
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.
Interesting about the epigenetics, transposons, and other DNA augmentations…
These are all fundamentally a story of how the individual encounters and uses information in their lived experience. But there is also a very strong consensus narrative that must be respected, but also challenged and evolved. DNA is literally the informational substrate of a life… when you adopt a personal belief, or are subject to someone elses, you have the ability to help but also harm your informational substrate. Tend your garden of ideas with love and care.
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.
Not just epigenetics, cells (and probably organisms) have mechanisms to induce mutations at elevated rates (e.g. E. Coli lacZ mutation under pressure). I wouldn't be surprised if nervous systems are elegantly wired to both epigentic and mutagenic levers to accelerate evolution through stimulus guided modifications rather than just raw survival/selection.
I guess this makes sense if you also consider the history of dog breeding. The best traits are always breed forward into future generations, those characteristics could be how athletic the dog is or how friendly the dog is.
From the perspective of an individual breeder, they cannot know how much of a trait is from DNA or not. It may be more likely to be DNA-driven if you can prove that the trait is durable over many generations, in different environments. At least, that is my guess.
Acknowledging this sort of theory was considered pseudoscience for many years, in the realm of epigenetics. I'm glad the gatekeepers are coming around to finally acknowledge this as real science. Now we just need a designated media personality to communicate it to the masses. After that, I can finally have a conversation about it without people casting me as a lunatic.
Another example of "evolution" being deprecated in favor of "backpropagation" and the result is an evolution towards a holistic intelligence, to which everything contributes?
I always find it fascinating when science catches up to the Bible.
The Bible clearly articulates some form of generational “pass-through” for the sins of the father passing to the children.
While I do think it largely refers to a spiritual judgement, it’s hard to ignore the real-world examples of abuse that always seem to repeat themselves without a huge effort on the part of, someone, usually the child after they’ve grown up, to break the cycle.
Source: I’ve seen a lot of brokenness in our country’s foster system.
Where does the Bible say that the sins of the father are passed to the children? Ezekiel 18 says exactly the opposite.
Romans 5 doesn't say we inherit Adam's sin but that we inherit the consequences of Adam's sin.
Exodus 20:5 says the iniquity of the fathers pass down for three or four generations. This is not referring to the sin itself, but to the effects of the sin of the children who grow up watching their parents sin and learn to do the same.
Psalm 51:5 says children are brought forth in iniquity and in sin they are conceived, but this doesn't refer to the child's sin but to the parent's sin.
The concept of original sin didn't come into being until early in the fifth century but there really isn't scriptural support for it.
> “This study shows that paternal exercise can confer benefits — enhanced endurance and metabolic health — to offspring,”
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
If you ignore "good" and "bad" then it's just "traits can be passed through this mechanism" egg seems a lot more reasonable.
But that's not what it says. RNA fragments are entering the ovum and having some sort of effect .... that's quite different from passing traits the way genes on chromosomes do.
But shouldn’t there have been an evolutionary advantage for such a thing to develop?
Not necessarily for the individual.
Some trees have mechanisms, for instance, where they die quickly but signal other trees if exposed to certain issues, allowing the other trees to put up a better defense.
Ants and other insects sometimes do the same thing.
Essentially a ‘jumps on the grenade’ gene.
s/egg/which/
You don't egg randomly inserted words?
eh… can someone please accurately vibe code this for me?
Now I want McDonalds McEggWhich
the section immediately after that you didn’t quote:
> evidence keeps piling up. Most recently, in November 2025, a comprehensive paper (opens a new tab) published in Cell Metabolism traced the downstream molecular effects of a father mouse’s exercise regimen on sperm microRNAs that target genes “critical for mitochondrial function and metabolic control” in a developing embryo. The researchers found many of those same RNAs overexpressed in the sperm of well-exercised human men.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...
I and others generally don't quote things that aren't relevant to the point we're making and I'm not keen on the crypt-accusation. I didn't say that there aren't downstream molecular effects--clearly there are. Rather, the article is very unclear about the nature of epigenetics, and the wording about "transmitting traits" is misleading at best and leads to many unwarranted conclusions, as evidenced in the comments here. The statements I quoted are not about transmitting traits. e.g., "paternal exercise" refers to a trait of exercising, taking time to exercise, being motivated to exercise, etc. The "conferred benefit" of "enhanced endurance and metabolic health" is a different trait. If that is the trait being transmitted then that should be the trait being identified in male parents, not "exercise". Similarly, being exposed to nicotine is not the trait of having livers that are good at "disarming" nicotine, cocaine, and a host of other toxins ... and this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and the article provides one citation, from 2017.
And as an epigeneticist says in the article, we have no idea how RNA is having the effects its having.
As I said, I'm happy to wait until we have moved beyond this early stage of research before making any radical inferences.
In the “paternal exercise” case the trait isn’t the habit of exercising, it’s the metabolic changes of exercise that are (apparently) conferred to both father and offspring.
You're completely missing the point that I explicitly stated. The trait that is purportedly being transmitted is metabolic changes that confer some advantage, but that's not what's being measured in the father, "exercise" is--not a word was said about fathers having better metabolic health, just that they "exercise". Which is reason to be skeptical of the claim.
Fair enough. It would be a clearer result (more “apples to apples”) if the same trait was directly measured “on both sides”. Thanks for restating.
Edit: typo
Have you considered that checking for that specifically might not be actually needed? After all, the correlation between exercise and metabolic health is well established.
That was my original thought, however if you want to quantify an effect it would be ideal to measure the same trait in both parent and offspring. I assume that the reason that this was done (I didn’t read the papers) is because this is a retrospective study, where the participants self-report on the exercise level of their fathers, rather than a longitudinal study which could measure the fathers’ metabolic state fitness at time of conception.
Thus, although there is a plausible link, I now agree with the parent post that this is sufficient reason to take the study with a grain of salt (given well known academic incentives to produce positive results, etc).
Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
For an example, scientists discovered both viruses and genetics long before they knew the molecular basis of either of them.
I'm well aware of that. The point is that people are drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this lay report on early stage research.
> The point is that people are drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this lay report on early stage research.
That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."
I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
I agree. The example with Nicotine intake having a somewhat positive effect on the children feels too wild at the money. Think of all the kids of the 60th and 70th. They must be immune to most toxins ;). Yes I take this example to the extreme. I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory. Why would it take so long for a given treat to establish itself. Maybe I mix too much into one bag after reading this one article.
>I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory.
It doesn't, but the article doesn't go into this detail, so people unfamiliar with the field wouldn't understand why. The keyword is epigenetics. I.e. how certain genes become activated or deactivated through behaviour and/or environmental influences. But the DNA sequence itself remains unaltered. So no evolution necessary. There are basically a bunch of molecules than sit on top of your DNA that regulate gene expression. They don't just tell a cell to behave like a skin cell or a brain cell, they also regulate the entire cellular metabolism. The discovery that male sperm can also transmit this epigenetic information to offspring is relatively new, but now that we know that, it makes total sense that these gene-expression-modifying behaviours in fathers could affect their children. After all, they simply get to start with a good (or bad) bunch of epigenetic markers. They will not persist across many generations though, so it has no real long term effect on evolution. It may even be an evolved mechanism that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes on timeframes that would be prohibited by evolution.
Not all epigenetics is regulation of gene expression. The article says "these molecules transmit traits to offspring and that they can regulate embryonic development after fertilization" -- that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate--it certainly isn't true in the way that genes express traits. And then they quote an actual epigeneticist saying “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part”
>that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate
It is pretty accurate, even if we don't understand all details yet. Here's a review article of the current research that's not from a popsci journalist: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37820-2
That does not in the least address my concern. Again, "it certainly isn't true in the way that genes express traits".
You may be confused by the terminology, but that is literally what the word "phenotype" in the linked article means. Just in science-lingo.
> ”They will not persist across many generations though”
Why not? Is there some tempering mechanism on epigenetic transfer? I could imagine that some sperm-conferred epigenetic markers could continue down the male descendants unbroken.
If I understand both correctly, a better answer to your question than sibling post is that yes, that could be imagined, but your dichotomy is not mutually exclusive, and the process described here is much more related to variable conditions of the environment and the parents’ health at the time of conception rather than to the replicable genetic structures.
Because chromosomes in nuclei reproduce via very sophisticated and highly regulated processes; random epigenetic molecules do not.
Makes me wonder about how the two interact in the human phenomenon of generational oscillations
Speaking mostly from personal experience here, if a kid gets a suped-up liver from their dad's smoking habits, cool. But how many kids fathers stopped smoking when the kid was born? My point, the father's smoking habits may have passed down a strong liver but his continued use damaged the child's lungs and possibly more.
These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.
If true, I suppose there is also a opportunity cost involved. Meaning selecting for better coping with nicotine, does not help selecting for smarter offspring and maybe even preventing that. So it might be somewhat positive but at a cost unknown.
Also there are the very known costs of nicotine damaging sperms, or of course being in literal smoke as a child (or adult) and deal with those real effects.
> They must be immune to most toxins ;)
Allergies and cancer are way up.
There’s multiple causes behind those, this is almost certainly one.
But seriously though, "immune" is a humorous exaggeration, but I'm not sure we have data to rule out the idea that this cohort has increased tolerance to some environmental toxins.
So it's possible the level of harm we see today is already "post-" this protective effect, if any.
He means that the hippie generation and disco generation took a lot of drugs.
I figured, just a joke playing off their typo (hence the smiley).
There were plenty of non-"drug" toxins people were exposed to where levels peaked around that time — leaded gasoline, early food contact plastics with unsafe additives, pesticides that are now banned, etc. But thanks Nancy Reagan. ;)
Humans put toxins into their bodies for the entire history of humankind.
You took a left-turn:
Nicotine is on-par with caffeine in isolation.
It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
I was surprised to learn nicotine is used by functional doctors to treat CFS-adjacent conditions, and the mechanisms therein.
> You took a left-turn
I certainly didn't; I simply quoted a sentence from the article. (I've noticed that some people have difficulty distinguishing between the person who quotes something and the person being quoted ... it might be a Sally-Anne effect.)
> It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
Yes, which makes this article even less reliable.
The part where you said nicotine was a bad habit seemed to be your words,
an unquoted section.
You can attribute that opinion to the author, or society, or whoever now, if you choose,
regardless my point remains: nicotine shouldn’t be filed under “bad habit” by default.
> The part where you said nicotine was a bad habit seemed to be your words
Seriously?
I can't take this as anything other than bad faith.
nicotine is significantly more harmful than caffeine, although it is definitely way better than the other stuff in tobacco and not a carcinogen.
let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
> nicotine is significantly more harmful than caffeine
“Significantly” is an opinion.
It’s more toxic by weight, yes.
Messes with vascular more than caffeine.
Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
> let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
Personally haven’t needed or wanted to use nicotine, but I have recovered from an array of chronic illnesses; I’ll get started on anything I please, thanks,
especially seeing how many of my peers are hopelessly exhausted and existing on abusive amounts of caffeine/prescription stimulants to get by.
> Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
Plain black coffee has, somewhat surprisingly, been repeatedly demonstrated to be very healthy - with substantial reductions in all-cause mortality as well as the chances of developing cardiovascular disease. I tend to live somewhat spartanly in terms of consumption, and wanted to drop my coffee habit which looks something like this [1], but looking up the data on it left me dropping that idea real fast.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhdCslFcKFU
Coffee ≠ caffeine, despite the coy conflations in office memes.
If you’re grinding your own (mycotoxins are real), hard to find a cleaner healthier form of caffeine than coffee!
Lots of morning-and-day soda and energy drink consumers. More than we even see, assuredly.
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Off-topic completely now,
but for your information, one last question:
does your opinion cover patents who have blood test results showing Lyme, and one or more known coinfections like Bab, Bart, (all known, and treatable bacterial infections),
or are you another Reddit regurgitation expert?
i think this isn’t going to be a productive conversation regardless of what i say. take care
We’re on the same page.
Also “mouse models”.
The only purpose mouse models serve is to fill the popular press with sensational findings and torture a lot of mice.
the only purpose of hacker news comments is to aggravate readers with overly reductive takes
Thanks, both of you, now please stop it.
They’re mice. I wouldn’t worry a whole lot about them.
For this particular research, it's possible as only 5% of mouse experiments become available to humans.
But a lot of life-saving medicaments and techniques started as mouse testings, including Penicillin, cancer drugs and the polio vaccine.
although it's like milk too. exposure at an early age leads to the body producing more lactase enzyme to digest it. but lack of exposure often makes people lactose intolerant.
I feel like the ghost of Lysenko is laughing at us.
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.
<thinks about activities during college> ehhhh I think before college would be highly preferable lol.
Though I've never had nor wanted kids in the first place anyway.
That'd be a great basis for a controlled experiment.
Nobel prize might be waiting for two sets of octomom same-egg offspring with compatible genders that join together to have n=8 firstborn children which are conceived at same date under the same conditions (no alcohol, no ongoing infections, etc.), and the pregnancy period is spent together.
It will definitely need 8 scientist relationships, a lot of energy and money.
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.
I have twins (a boy and a girl) and you could tell they have a completely different temperament about two weeks after birth.
I’m a twin - admittedly boy/girl, so already with some fundamental differences - and we are very, very different people. Always have been. Different interests, different ways of seeing the world, different attitudes to competition, sports, social relationships etc.
Now I’ve got 2 boys, and even at fairly young ages they were very different. I’d say by 6 months old the basics of their personalities were visible, and they haven’t changed vastly as they’ve grown.
The twins I have known are the same. I would assume it has something to do with a desire to differentiate themselves from one another, but they always seemed far more dissimilar in personality and affect than my siblings.
OTOH could be siblings tend to be more similar as the smaller ones try to copy the older ones (my son would dress up as a ballerina to play with his sister when he was little, my smaller brother would acquiesce to play chess with me just to spend time together etc).
I have given up trying to explain child development, there's just too many variables.
An adjacent point but despite ubiquitous birth order superstitions quality literature consensus seems to be that birth order is not a large driver of predictable differences. Example:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4655556/
Agree, those are some environmental differences. But any "microRNA" profile I might have contributed to the conception of each would be broadly similar. My life was pretty stable and levels of stress, diet, exercise, etc. were all about the same for all three.
There are even identical twins that have different behaviors, characters and make different decisions.
I agree with what you are saying but remember the twin scenario. Spoiler alert, the kids are nonetheless different.
Well that’s just
> No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man
On the other hand, you sometimes get identical twins who share every random tick and tendency and finish each others thoughts.
But your kids will likely not have your insights and experiences so “tuning” is another word for broadening their awareness.
That is precisely the wrong sort of conclusion to draw from this clickbaity article.
When expectations are bundled with trying, then yes disappointment is inevitable. Expectations are not a good reason to not try.
> 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?
Then you'll probably have kids who resemble Wim Hof
Without the sci-fi, if you take people with 10 to 12 kids, you have great accidental, natural, objective experiments here.
You can study those kids and compare them to the reported lifestyle of the parents at the time before their conception.
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 maybe everyone should do so we all can avoid awkward moments that stick for way longer than they should.
Nah just yell “switcheroo!” then grab her outfit and suddenly you're the waitress and she’s the diner with a meal to enjoy.
Is this a lucid dream?
> saves cumming
> savescumming
Savecumming?
Slang term for frequently reloading game state from recent save when a non-ideal outcome occurs. E.g. this method can be used to collect rare outcomes from a RNG-based game event.
Wait until these people find out what “scum” (as in scumbag) is a slang term for
Like restoring to a particular save point in a game after you've done something stupid.
> if you go off the deep end you can snapshot quite literally your best self
Or your worst, since the article also suggests that bad habits can be epigenetically useful to the offspring.
I would hold off reaching any conclusions from this clickbait.
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!
There isn't any specific way that boomers behave.
Adding "jk" after a casual prejudiced insult to a demographic doesn't undo the prejudiced insult.
I'm insulting myself. I'm describing what is my family dynamic.
Insulting yourself might have been your intent, but what you wrote is just a general ageist insult. It's like you when you fail something, and you make a racist analogy. You might want to insult yourself, you might think you are insulting yourself, but you are just racist.
No, you're insulting boomers, and you just doubled down.
It was a self-deprecating joke which back-fired because nuance is lost on the internet. You got triggered, which is entirely human, but at this point, you're the one who is doubling down. Perhaps it's a good time to disconnect and enjoy some time with your family.
I didn't "down" in the first place, but "no you" is typical of your ilk. Your comment is dishonest denial of your ageist bigotry, an inability to take responsibility for your actions. And I don't take life advice from trolls, bigots, and the like.
I won't respond further.
I'm sorry you feel that way.
Which demographic was casually insulted here? The babies/third children?
We need to add birth order to federally protected categories lest the thirdies try something on us deserving firstborn.
Boomers. How can anyone not grasp that? It's as if the insult is like water to fish, so people don't even perceive it.
Given the number of comments complaining about that specific line, I'd say it's more like bait to fish. Retirement must be boring
Is calling someone boomer an insult in itself?
I get that saying “boomer ruined the world for all the generations afterwards” is an insult, but the word itself is now considered an insult?
Genuinely asking here; the constantly shifting landscape of what one is allowed to say when talking to US Americans is a bit hard for me to navigate and I currently only have online discourse as guidepost (which is like 1000% more toxic)
Your question is disingenuous, as the word "boomer" didn't appear isolated with no context. The statement was "the baby acts like a boomer", which clearly has a pejorative connotation--you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here? The babies/third children?" ... it's not even possible to think that babies are being insulted without thinking that saying they're like boomers is insulting. As I said, that seems to be an unquestioned assumption.
As I said elsewhere, there is no single way that boomers behave. Boomers are simply people born in the post-war boom, from 1946-1964, and they display a huge range of traits. Virtually all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative--ageist bigotry.
> what one is allowed to say
This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
I've said my piece and won't engage further.
How does “the baby acts like a boomer” have negative connotations? Sounds like you are personally offended that the word “boomer” exists and projecting here.
> you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here
I asked this because boomer was the only possible demographic in GPs post, not because I think the term boomer is pejorative in itself. Chilling and ambition are obviously not demographics but qualities.
> This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
If you want to go there, this argument is bad faith as well… of course I can say anything, but you seem to be personally offended that the term boomer exists and I simply don’t understand why.
> all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative
Is that true for every other age group, so for example is every statement that refers to “millennials” or “zoomers” automatically pejorative and ageist?
> Virtually all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative--ageist bigotry.
It's not ageist to have complaints against a specific generation, not the one before, not the one after, with those complaints sticking to that generation as their age changes.
(Whether those complaints are right or wrong on a statistical level is a different issue.)
Fine, it's some other sort of stupid ignorant intellectually dishonest bigotry. (Most of the people who get attacked as boomers are actually in the generation before them.)
> Whether those complaints are right or wrong on a statistical level is a different issue.
Only because you have made it one. The word "ageist" was the least part of my comment (but there is in fact a strong ageist element to the pejorative use of the term, contrary to your mischaracterization of the realities of its use ... notably, the people who use it are younger, never older, and have not used it throughout time--they couldn't, as they weren't even born when boomers arrived on the scene and for decades afterwards).
I won't respond further.
:\ why are you pretending that you don't know how casual *-isms work.
In case you don't: "the baby acts like a boomer" is not insulting agaist third children, but it is casually ageist.
It is casually insulting, as in bringing a generally insulting framework into a different topic.
You're right, and it's bizarre and sad that people don't even know what you mean.
Please tell me you’re joking.
He was, see his comment from 1h before you posted.
> 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
"Hard headed", "not a cheap date", "not a lightweight"? Hard to say if increased tolerance is good or bad (especially if we're uncertain about how addictiveness/susceptibility to addictive behavior it passed)
I would have thought the main armament that nicotine has is its addictiveness
perhaps "making less harmful to the body"? this could potentially be accomplished separately from making them less effective
Damn. I didn't start substance abuse until after all my children were sired. Apparently I have done them an injustice by compromising their resistance to cocaine and other toxins. I have failed as a father!
Well, there's always next time.
ok now is my chance.
what is this (opens new tab) phenomenon?!
In the article, there's a link in the text right before they put that parenthetical. I'm guessing they're saying that the link interested them so they clicked it to read but opened it in a new tab so they could finish the current article first.
It seems to be hidden text in the page? Either way, it just shows up alongside links when you copy text from the article.
Oh interesting! That didn't even occur to me.
Probably a screen reader callout.
"microdose cocaine"
> rationalist
Not without a new cult spin-off you don't!
Someone who works out every day will obviously have different metabolic and microRNA profiles; assuming that line of research holds up and those biomolecular profiles make it into the zygote, survive many replication cycles, and act as developmental signalling molecules affecting gene expression during embryonic and fetal development, there could be life-long effects.
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.
For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
> Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed.
While there is absolutely no conclusive evidence, there are a few studies that indicate this is a possibility.
One such study from 2013: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594
Again, there’s not strong proof- but at least plausible evidence.
It does depend on how specific the thing is. Spiders in general maybe, but for a particular type of spider seems to have close to nil possibility.
But if, evolutionarily, there are only 20 common recurring threats that you need to fear (but each comes at some kind of cost, like you won't hunt in an area that would otherwise provide food), it would make sense to pass on those fears in a generational way. So the possible things come from a preset list that has evolved over millions of years, that recur over and over but only in specific times and places.
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 severe stress.
For example, constantly worrying about money because you’re poor can definitely put you under severe stress. Also, growing up without secure attachment to your caretakers, being asked to do role reversal (having to take care of your parents as a child), things like that will generate complex PTSD.
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.
And the comment you’re replying to suggests that since many lived experiences are plausibly heritable, the term is appropriate. In any case, the context in which it is actually used in the article seems beyond all but the most pedantic reproach:
>The first is how a father’s body physically encodes lived experience, such as stress, diet, exercise or nicotine use
And that’s a single sentence partway through the article. From the beginning, the refrain is the list of the sorts of things that seem to have heritable effect, not the phrase “lived experiences”.
>Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children
>Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring
Etc. The article is clearly not attempting to suggest that all experiences are heritable.
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.
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A lot of this is transmitted via the language. The stories we form as a result of events in our lives, have power to set our values in all areas. These myths of the self, have what is essentially a value manifest for someone. And these myths, can be so strongly held that it will influence the person and family’s moods, actions, habits.
What is important is to note that there are many formulas for consciousness. Some are truely bonkers, some are just fundamental truth. And some… have yet to be discovered.
Permutations and combinatorics create a hyperspace of all ridiculous things!
> The authors pointed out “there are significant drawbacks in the existing human literature” including “lack of longitudinal studies, methodological heterogeneity, selection of tissue type, and the influence of developmental stage and trauma type on methylation outcomes”
The literature in this area is a mess, has become highly politicized. I’d give it another 10 or so years before I made any strong statements about these effects in humans. Famously the study of Holocaust survivors’ descendants didn’t show transgenerational effects.
Not much of a stretch to consider that the brain is wired to initiate biochemistry that modifies the germ line.
Fascinating! So in addition to the source code (DNA), when you spawn a new child process nature passes along a config file (RNA) as well.
Inheriting environment variables
Earlier this year moving home to Canada, instead of flying I bought a van in California and drove it back with all my stuff.
I was taken aback to learn my dad did the exact same thing at my age!
Any particular reason for moving back to Canada ?
Yes, it was configured in his mRNA
Is this a revival of Lysenkoism?[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Every time we think Lamarckism is finally dead, we get stuff like the article.
Curious if in vitro fertilization (IVF) could consider RNA impact when evaluating fitness.
Current criteria appear to be motility, morphology, and DNA attributes (fragmentation & integrity) [1], all mostly visual or physical assessments.
[1] https://vidafertility.com/en/best-sperm-selection/
> “It’s still very hand-wavy,” said the epigeneticist Colin Conine (opens a new tab) of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
okay, I trust this article and source more
where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
I would recommend keeping tabs on authors rather than periodically checking specific publications.
> okay, I trust this article and source more
Quanta Magazine is great! They have a cool YouTube channel as well
Epigenetics is fascinating. For example, the well-docunented effects of war on the following generations. For example, longevity.
This reminds me of the transgenerational trauma on the descendants of the Dutch Hongerwinter of 1944-45. Generations after, people carry in their epigenics the effects of that tragedy:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics_of_anxiety_and_str...
Is this not the basis of epigenetics? Don’t we already have human-based examples?
While I don’t recall the details there was an example of how starvation (of eventual parents) during WW II impacted the children. There is also, a similar example of how the effects of diet was passed along during The Great Depression.
Maybe we should stop viewing DNA as source code or I guess more importantly as the sole source of heritability. It's clear that parts of DNA are somehow variably expressed. Different sections of DNA are "unrolled" depending on how you live your life, and unrolled DNA is part of an entire complex. Now it seems parts of that complex are heritable.
Just a guess. I'm not a biologist.
It makes a kind of intuitive sense to me. Given I have no real understanding of the topic. Perfect click bait to get me to feel smart waxing intellectual on the toilet.
It’s interesting to think this information being passed is something like “Heads up. This dude does a lot of exercise which means it must be crucial to survival wherever we are.”
Exercise and take nicotine. My kids have a leg up it seems.
I can imagine how difficult it would be to differentiate between nature and nurture in such human observations. An exercising vs smoking parent affects the child because of his RNA or his behaviour? Identical twins studies have their limitations in number of participants.
"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.
> So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
I hard disagree. Your comment to me reads as if a paper should either prove a new theory or disprove an existing theory.
However, publishing new results without a clear understanding of how it works is just as valid and this seems to be that. In Phsyics and Astronomy, new observations are often published without a theory of how it works. This is not a bad thing, that is part of the collaborative nature of science. The same holds true for papers suggesting a new theory, but lacking either observational or theoretical proof.
These flaws aren't failings of the article, but univeral to science, knowledge, and human endeavor:
> 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.
This describes all science and all knowledge; if that's not good enough, nothing is good enough. Everything somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect; the best stuff is much more of the former. Newton's Laws are mostly correct, somewhat incorrect.
> science does not really work well when it is based on speculation
Speculation is the foundation of science: it leads to an hypothesis, which leads to research, which leads to more speculation.
> their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
That also is the nature of all science. For example, papers include analyses of their own blind spots and weaknesses, and end with suggestions for further research by others.
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
That's also part of science and all human endeavor. If you disallow that, we might as well go back to being illiterate - everything we read is flawed, and inevitably some is wrong.
There is plenty of room in science for research that is just to examine and collect data. I don't understand your argument that science should only be to demonstrate claims and "completing" theories. Is science not about experimenting to slowly form a more complete understanding about how our world works? Research that does little more than collect novel data and show probable correlations is still extremely valuable.
Detecting an effect is present is separate from effect power and mechanism. Showing an effect is present is usually the first step before the other two.
> 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 don't understand your criticism.
It makes complete sense that the researchers are worried about the research being oversold. It's routine for media to take a scientific finding and grossly exaggerate its impact, i.e. "New research proves you can exercise your way to a fit child" or whatever.
This is science, we don't know if anything is "correct." The more compelling the research, the more we can adjust our priors as to what is "correct."
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
There are also lots of examples where theories were later not shown to be wrong. What's your point?
Do you have an actual, concrete criticism of the methodology of the epigentic research in TFA, or are your just bloviating?
I have two children:
Prior to them, I didnt think that behaviour or traits are inheritable.
When one of them was aronud 3 or 3.5, I observed an interesting behaviour: It was about the meal, which contained fries - and ketchup. He saw that the ketchup was flowing slowly towards the fries and reached there finally - he became funnily hectict, trying to prevent even more ketchup touching the fries.
Today I think he behaved that way ... because ... on my plate which fries & ketchup ... if this happens ... then ... you know :-D :-D :-D :-D It drives me nuts, really - if I am at a restaurant, I ask always for separte plates for things which are fried, because I love the crust and it gets destroyed if any type of gravy is scattered around the plate :-D
Or maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-D
But what I can clearly see, is: In their body shape I can see that their mother and I were super-fit-in-shape when they were "created".
Nurture.
Note sure if I understand what you mean?
You mean that we showed them already by that age to not mix fries & ketchup? :-D If children are that small and you are sitting with two of them at the table, handing over those ideas to them in a "nurturing way" is the last thing on what you can focus on with two small kids at the table :-))
And its always great if someone gives a downvote here if you share some personal life stories :-D
I believe that GP is trying to say that your child picked up that behaviour by watching you.
Monkey see, monkey do. (No offence intended towards your child.)
For some reason this just made me think of the "I learned it from you, dad!" PSAs of my childhood.
Edit: apparently it was "I learned it by watching you!"
Lysenkoism[1] reborn? Hopefully not.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
Anxiously looking forward to AGI in the form of übermäuse
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There is no notable evidence here, just theoretical hints. Sympathetic magic, translated into modern context.
Sooo how many leetcodes i d have to do before my future child aytomatically knows it all at birth?
Lamarck has entered the chat
I think its interesting that in the "rationalist" latter half of the 20th century Freud began to be dismissed at least in part on account of his elective affinity with Lamarck; now, it is clear that certain environmental and social factors have an influence on offspring at the genomic level from both parents.
Freud was not a scientist, he was a great artist. It is not clear whether any of his patients got better after Freud's treatment.
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.
Interesting about the epigenetics, transposons, and other DNA augmentations…
These are all fundamentally a story of how the individual encounters and uses information in their lived experience. But there is also a very strong consensus narrative that must be respected, but also challenged and evolved. DNA is literally the informational substrate of a life… when you adopt a personal belief, or are subject to someone elses, you have the ability to help but also harm your informational substrate. Tend your garden of ideas with love and care.
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.
Not just epigenetics, cells (and probably organisms) have mechanisms to induce mutations at elevated rates (e.g. E. Coli lacZ mutation under pressure). I wouldn't be surprised if nervous systems are elegantly wired to both epigentic and mutagenic levers to accelerate evolution through stimulus guided modifications rather than just raw survival/selection.
But only recent data related to successful reproduction.
I guess this makes sense if you also consider the history of dog breeding. The best traits are always breed forward into future generations, those characteristics could be how athletic the dog is or how friendly the dog is.
You're talking about traits passed via DNA, which is nothing new ... this is quite different.
From the perspective of an individual breeder, they cannot know how much of a trait is from DNA or not. It may be more likely to be DNA-driven if you can prove that the trait is durable over many generations, in different environments. At least, that is my guess.
This completely misses the point.
How about my grandfather's effect, and up the chain?
Acknowledging this sort of theory was considered pseudoscience for many years, in the realm of epigenetics. I'm glad the gatekeepers are coming around to finally acknowledge this as real science. Now we just need a designated media personality to communicate it to the masses. After that, I can finally have a conversation about it without people casting me as a lunatic.
Classic patriarchy!
Another example of "evolution" being deprecated in favor of "backpropagation" and the result is an evolution towards a holistic intelligence, to which everything contributes?
IOW, a Large Life Model?
No, the article is about science, not religion.
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oh shit....
I always find it fascinating when science catches up to the Bible.
The Bible clearly articulates some form of generational “pass-through” for the sins of the father passing to the children.
While I do think it largely refers to a spiritual judgement, it’s hard to ignore the real-world examples of abuse that always seem to repeat themselves without a huge effort on the part of, someone, usually the child after they’ve grown up, to break the cycle.
Source: I’ve seen a lot of brokenness in our country’s foster system.
Where does the Bible say that the sins of the father are passed to the children? Ezekiel 18 says exactly the opposite.
Romans 5 doesn't say we inherit Adam's sin but that we inherit the consequences of Adam's sin.
Exodus 20:5 says the iniquity of the fathers pass down for three or four generations. This is not referring to the sin itself, but to the effects of the sin of the children who grow up watching their parents sin and learn to do the same.
Psalm 51:5 says children are brought forth in iniquity and in sin they are conceived, but this doesn't refer to the child's sin but to the parent's sin.
The concept of original sin didn't come into being until early in the fifth century but there really isn't scriptural support for it.