HN

Comments (116)

• Menu

  jibal
  > “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.
• decimalenough
  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.
• Menu

  jjmarr
  > 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.
• Menu

  websiteapi
  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.
• Menu

  lachlan_gray
  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!
• Menu

  harshreality
  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.
• childintime
  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?
• Menu

  Animats
  Is this a revival of Lysenkoism?[1][1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
• Menu

  KellyCriterion
  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 :-DOr maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-DBut 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".
• turtleyacht
  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/
• tsoukase
  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.
• Menu

  shevy-java
  "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.1197258It was later redacted - a total fabrication. A lie.
• bradley13
  Epigenetics is fascinating. For example, the well-docunented effects of war on the following generations. For example, longevity.
• Menu

  technick
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• indigodaddy
  How about my grandfather's effect, and up the chain?
• Menu

  downboots
  Anxiously looking forward to AGI in the form of übermäuse
• bethekidyouwant
  Exercise and take nicotine. My kids have a leg up it seems.
• Menu

  zerofor_conduct
  Lamarck has entered the chat
• Menu

  yieldcrv
  > “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 Philadelphiaokay, I trust this article and source morewhere can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
• diego_moita
  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...
• marsven_422
  [dead]
• Xevion
  [flagged]
• anonwebguy
  [flagged]
• agentifysh
  oh shit....