7 ms·

Heredity Beyond the Gene

96 points by dnetesn 9y ago

ozy 9y ago
Since life or evolution is basically self-replication with variation in a shared environment, any mechanism that can carry information forwards can and probably will be used, or has been in the past. From that perspective, some phenotype changes are trivially genotype changes. (Eg anything that changes the egg-cell, will influence the life that grows from it.) It is weird to expect only DNA to be used. The process is not that orderly. The special thing about DNA (and a few other mechanisms), it is invariant to phenotype changes. And that it will copy over information that has no direct influences on self-replication. That is what enabled unlimited heredity.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Not that weird in fact. For hereditary information too be properly passed on, the mechanism must be relatively stable and somewhat controllable. The known epigenetic mechanisms (e.g. methylation patterns) fit this bill. Cell also has more than just a single set of DNA - it also inherits mitochondria and maternal mitochondrial DNA. Maternal phenotype is important only so far as it affects cell development very early in life or has strong effect on epigenetic mechanisms. Those mechanisms are indeed affected by conditions "in the womb". As for paternal effects, sperm is an antigen and hormone too. The article seems to be written to a person stuck in very old view of genome and heritability. I'm pretty sure no accrual scientist in the field believes the core thesis.
  - ycombinete 9y ago
    It's most likely written to the lay-person who is interested in science, not the scientist in the field.
    - akanet 9y ago
      I am such a layperson and especially appreciated this article.
  - macawfish 9y ago
    A relative of mine has a recent PhD in pharmacy and wasn't familiar with this way of thinking. (In our conversation, they also expressed a believe that race is genetic). My hunch is that there are still a lot of old school professors out there, firmly stuck in their neodarwinian ways, teaching students like my relative outdated paradigms. It wasn't too long ago that this framework was scientifically taboo, considered Lamarckian, even pseudoscience. And scientists are horrified of being called "crack pots" or "pseudoscientific".
    - DataWorker 9y ago
      Genetics is an outdated paradigm and race is not primarily an expression of genetic variation?
      - tangent128 9y ago
        "DNA is the only source of inherited traits" is an outdated thesis, yes. Genetic variation within a racial group is comparable to genetic variation across groups, making it incoherent as a biological concept even before you get into more-obviously-cultural constructs like the "one-drop rule".
        toasterlovin 9y ago
        Large genetic variation within groups does not invalidate that there are measurable aggregate differences in gene frequencies between groups. Which is why it is trivially easy to accurately identify people of African, East Asian, and European ancestry by sight alone.
    - akatechis 9y ago
      Race is definitely genetic.
      - rflrob 9y ago
        In one particular sense, it is true that there are genetic elements of race and that some genetic diseases are more prevalent among those of one race than another. But once you start drilling down into what we mean by "race", it's not at all a simple picture. For one thing, there are almost no markers that are perfectly diagnostic for race—almost any particular polymorphism is found in almost every race, though at different frequencies. Furthermore, some of what naively you would consider a race (e.g. "Black" or "White") is composed of multiple, genetically distinct populations that are no more closely related to each other than to other populations not in that race. So most serious geneticists have tended to move away from thinking of "race" as closely linked to genetics—the complicated contours of both population genetics and what we mean when we talk about race just don't fit together all that well, and coupled with a history of unethical policies justified by overly simplistic scientific knowledge in this field, it's best to be careful about the terms we use.
triviatise 9y ago
lamarckianism is not nonsense at all. It has been known in microrganisms for at least 30 years and is one of the foundations of molecular biology research. Plasmids are genetic structures that can be acquired by a bacteria and then passed on to descendants or through the environment to peer organisms. Antibiotic resistance is one of the most common traits passed this way.
- tsax 9y ago
  Greg Cochran, an expert geneticist who wrote 'The 10,000 Year Explosion' has a different view. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3310KWlDXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3310KWlDXg (especially the Q&A which is dominated by epigenetics). 2) This explains it in text -> https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/epigenetics/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/epigenetics/
  - cadlin 9y ago
    Greg Cochran isn't an expert geneticist. He's a consultant with a PhD in physics who was an anthropology adjunct for ten years. He doesn't have any training as a geneticist or in biological research. It's all in his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-cochran-48b51b79/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-cochran-48b51b79/
calibas 9y ago
I assume most people were taught the same things I was, namely that Lamarckism is ridiculous nonsense, and now we're finding it has elements of truth.
- 09bjb 9y ago
  I like the attitude, that we can't throw anything out completely if we're to be open to new learning...but let's categorize these effects as "epigenetics" broadly and leave Lamarckism at rest :)
  - calibas 9y ago
    Part of the problem is that it hasn't been laid to rest, it's still being taught as an example of an outdated and mistaken scientific theory, which has lead to a bias against epigenetics.
  - trendia 9y ago
    But even epigenetics does not cover all of the ways that derived traits can be passed. For instance, prenatal testosterone levels affect the baby [0], yet those same levels may be affected by the mother's environment. Hence the environment may have effect on lifespring through means other than just epigenetics. [0] http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2015-09-23/masculine-face-linked-to-testosterone-levels-in-womb/6795422 http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2015-09-23/masculine-face...
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - toasterlovin 9y ago
      Prenatal testosterone can alter the baby's phenotype, but can it alter the baby's genotype? Something has to alter the baby's genotype (more specifically, the genes in germ line cells, which are the only cells whose genetic material gets passed on to offspring) in order to count as a method of heritability. Otherwise prenatal testosterone is the same as any other thing in the environment which can alter an organism's phenotype.
stcredzero 9y ago
There's another kind of heredity which it's very important to discuss, with regards to opposing certain problematic ideologies. (Both far left and far right.) For human beings, culture, as a powerful multiplier of intelligence, is far more important than genes. Immigrant groups to the US, like Italians and Poles, increased their average IQ scores by about a whole standard deviation in about 2 generations in the early 20th century. Even hot-button topics, like the IQ scores of Black people in the US have data which suggest that it is culture which is both a source of great inertia/difficulty and a source of great hope. On the side of hope, one study found that the Black children of US service-people in Germany were the same as other children growing up in Germany. Likewise, evidence for cultural factors in the success of people in various fields is very strong. For example, Jewish immigrant communities have often dominated local tailoring industries in cities across thousands of years of history and several continents. However, it would be laughable to suggest the existence of a tailoring gene. Information of the kind above has been suppressed by the Far Left in the West. It has also been taken up in a dishonestly distorted form by the worst fringes of the Alt-Right. However, the complete story demolishes both Far Left and Alt-Right ideological messages. In the power of culture, there is hope for the future. If the potato famine Irish could lift themselves to their current place in 21st century society, out of utter unemployable status, poverty lower than that of the contemporaneous American slave, and the sewage-smelling crime and terrorism-ridden slums of New York and London, there is nothing that cultural transmission can't do. http://a.co/6K2o7XS http://a.co/6K2o7XS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr9GRgRw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr9GRgRw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w0X71d9Z08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w0X71d9Z08 (Also herein is a cautionary tale. History shows many, many examples of migrant groups who find themselves lagging behind. They are often kept in cultural isolation away from the mainstream of their local society, often, by their own elite, which uses this to maintain their status as group leaders. Culture is powerful, but its power can be harnessed to do great harm as well.)
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  I think it's always handy to keep in mind that human culture is a result of genetics.
  - 9y ago
xr4ti 9y ago
I don't see why this should be very surprising to people. It's not difficult to think of heritable traits that have nothing to do with genetics such as: social status, money/property, spoken language, etc. Biological phenomena exist on molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and planetary scales. The assumption that genetics would be the only mode of entanglement would seem to be overly reductionist.
- toasterlovin 9y ago
  Heritability has a different meaning from how you are using it. A trait is heritable if a child displays the trait regardless of their environmental milieu. So, language is not heritable because the language you speak depends solely on the environment you grow up in; the child of English speakers will speak Spanish if they are raised in an environment where only Spanish is spoken. Height, on the other hand, is heritable, because, absent major malnutrition, the child of tall parents will be tall regardless of the environment they grow up in. And regarding status and wealth: genetics probably play more of a factor in these than you think.
  - thraway180306 9y ago
    I find your confident view loaded. How can you say what heritability means ontologically, when the only way of ascertaining it is through mathematical statistics that doesn't care about your distinctions between genetic or cultural origins of the effects. Unless very carefully controlled, which is apparently too much to ask form the crude tools used in these studies. Specifically about height you are mistaken this is clear-cut. First there is influence if populace is not under closure. Immigrants and emigrants affect height. A study that controlled for this was taken on pretty stable populace of Norway. Since height is also perceived as attractive and matters in sexual selection it was no surprise that Norse rose 10 cm over a century, or 2.5 cm in a generation. For such an effect to work exclusively through selection though the average height of parents must have been several centimetre higher than the average height of populace! The magnitude of the effect is just too large to work solely through selection at that pace. Thusly it is to be concluded that height is not purely genetic but also an environmental adaptation, both captured in heritability.
learnstats2 9y ago
Contrary to some other comments, heredity by definition excludes culture. Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability. The goal is to take culture out of the consideration and look at the biology. (You may argue how successful this can be, but it is the goal, and it is what is meant by ‘heredity’) It’s reasonable to expect/have learned that all heredity must come through genes - which the headline illustrates - but we are starting to explore other mechanisms for heredity. The article makes no comment on cultural transmission, which is entirely an independent concept.
- thelamest 9y ago
  You can neither manipulate nor naturally observe the full range of possible cultural variation, though. And this problem will in fact inflate the additive genetic estimates. Ie. if we only observed plants in 21% oxygen, or never modified diets in phenylketonuria, we'd miss something important (in these simple cases, we knew it from other sources, but it's rarely this easy).
- balance_factor 9y ago
  > Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability. And how often does this happen? It is about as common as a sighting of the Higgs boson - and you need a large sample group. Of "identical" twins separated at birth (identical twins are not genetically identical) and sent to two culturally/class-based different families, with little contact. The Pioneer Fund (you can read about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund ) funded studies like the Minnesota Twin Family Study, but it was found to have many deficiencies, such as what I noted. Often twins in the cohort were only raised apart for a few years and so forth. On occasion I watch television, and see wealthy heirs like the Hilton heiresses or Kardashian heiresses, or watch documentaries like Born Rich with various heirs and heiresses, and it's quite obvious why such a class spends its money on endeavors that says nature rules over nurture. Like the heir Wickliffe Draper did with the Pioneer Fund. That they are born superior without having to work or do anything. For the past ten millennia they said the gods favored them, like Socrates noble lie ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic ). The popes crowned them king. In our post-enlightened age this does not work so now they say their superiority comes from chains of amino acids. Of course, history tends to depose of them any how, the God-ordained superior genetics of the Romanovs were not as well adapted as the Bolshevik soldiers who rid the earth of them (tangential note - their inbreeding caused hemophilia which brought in Rasputin and hastened their downfall). It's an argument for laziness and parasitism - to not look at people by their work, but by the genetic superiority which they were supposedly born with. It's pathetic and parasitic.
a_bonobo 9y ago
There is a bit of very recent, new epigenetics controversy in this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/20/170506 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/20/170506 >Frequent lack of repressive capacity of promoter DNA methylation identified through genome-wide epigenomic manipulation tl;dr: they engineered a protein which methylates regions of the genome in human cells and checked how that affects gene transcription. In many cases where they showed that the gene's regulatory region was methylated were still transcribed, contrary to what many other studies are indicating. >These findings suggest that promoter DNA methylation is not generally sufficient for transcriptional inactivation, with implications for the emerging field of epigenome engineering. Perhaps methylation could be a footprint of something we don't know about yet.
yters 9y ago
If Lamarkianisn is true, then is intelligent design true?
- daemonk 9y ago
  How do those two things relate?
  - yters 9y ago
    Lamarkianism claims animals manipulate their own genome to achieve a purpose. Intelligent design claims evolution exhibits purposeful change, which can be scientifically detected. Darwinian evolution claims all purpose is illusive, and merely a function of random variation and natural selection. Consequently, if Lamarkianism is true, then so is intelligent design.

96 points by dnetesn 9y ago

ozy 9y ago

Since life or evolution is basically self-replication with variation in a shared environment, any mechanism that can carry information forwards can and probably will be used, or has been in the past. From that perspective, some phenotype changes are trivially genotype changes. (Eg anything that changes the egg-cell, will influence the life that grows from it.) It is weird to expect only DNA to be used. The process is not that orderly. The special thing about DNA (and a few other mechanisms), it is invariant to phenotype changes. And that it will copy over information that has no direct influences on self-replication. That is what enabled unlimited heredity.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Not that weird in fact. For hereditary information too be properly passed on, the mechanism must be relatively stable and somewhat controllable. The known epigenetic mechanisms (e.g. methylation patterns) fit this bill. Cell also has more than just a single set of DNA - it also inherits mitochondria and maternal mitochondrial DNA. Maternal phenotype is important only so far as it affects cell development very early in life or has strong effect on epigenetic mechanisms. Those mechanisms are indeed affected by conditions "in the womb". As for paternal effects, sperm is an antigen and hormone too. The article seems to be written to a person stuck in very old view of genome and heritability. I'm pretty sure no accrual scientist in the field believes the core thesis.
- ycombinete 9y ago
  It's most likely written to the lay-person who is interested in science, not the scientist in the field.
  - akanet 9y ago
    I am such a layperson and especially appreciated this article.
- macawfish 9y ago
  A relative of mine has a recent PhD in pharmacy and wasn't familiar with this way of thinking. (In our conversation, they also expressed a believe that race is genetic). My hunch is that there are still a lot of old school professors out there, firmly stuck in their neodarwinian ways, teaching students like my relative outdated paradigms. It wasn't too long ago that this framework was scientifically taboo, considered Lamarckian, even pseudoscience. And scientists are horrified of being called "crack pots" or "pseudoscientific".
  - DataWorker 9y ago
    Genetics is an outdated paradigm and race is not primarily an expression of genetic variation?
    - tangent128 9y ago
      "DNA is the only source of inherited traits" is an outdated thesis, yes. Genetic variation within a racial group is comparable to genetic variation across groups, making it incoherent as a biological concept even before you get into more-obviously-cultural constructs like the "one-drop rule".
      - toasterlovin 9y ago
        Large genetic variation within groups does not invalidate that there are measurable aggregate differences in gene frequencies between groups. Which is why it is trivially easy to accurately identify people of African, East Asian, and European ancestry by sight alone.
  - akatechis 9y ago
    Race is definitely genetic.
    - rflrob 9y ago
      In one particular sense, it is true that there are genetic elements of race and that some genetic diseases are more prevalent among those of one race than another. But once you start drilling down into what we mean by "race", it's not at all a simple picture. For one thing, there are almost no markers that are perfectly diagnostic for race—almost any particular polymorphism is found in almost every race, though at different frequencies. Furthermore, some of what naively you would consider a race (e.g. "Black" or "White") is composed of multiple, genetically distinct populations that are no more closely related to each other than to other populations not in that race. So most serious geneticists have tended to move away from thinking of "race" as closely linked to genetics—the complicated contours of both population genetics and what we mean when we talk about race just don't fit together all that well, and coupled with a history of unethical policies justified by overly simplistic scientific knowledge in this field, it's best to be careful about the terms we use.

triviatise 9y ago

lamarckianism is not nonsense at all. It has been known in microrganisms for at least 30 years and is one of the foundations of molecular biology research. Plasmids are genetic structures that can be acquired by a bacteria and then passed on to descendants or through the environment to peer organisms. Antibiotic resistance is one of the most common traits passed this way.

tsax 9y ago
Greg Cochran, an expert geneticist who wrote 'The 10,000 Year Explosion' has a different view. 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3310KWlDXg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3310KWlDXg (especially the Q&A which is dominated by epigenetics). 2) This explains it in text -> https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/epigenetics/ https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/10/26/epigenetics/
- cadlin 9y ago
  Greg Cochran isn't an expert geneticist. He's a consultant with a PhD in physics who was an anthropology adjunct for ten years. He doesn't have any training as a geneticist or in biological research. It's all in his LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-cochran-48b51b79/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregory-cochran-48b51b79/

calibas 9y ago

I assume most people were taught the same things I was, namely that Lamarckism is ridiculous nonsense, and now we're finding it has elements of truth.

09bjb 9y ago
I like the attitude, that we can't throw anything out completely if we're to be open to new learning...but let's categorize these effects as "epigenetics" broadly and leave Lamarckism at rest :)
- calibas 9y ago
  Part of the problem is that it hasn't been laid to rest, it's still being taught as an example of an outdated and mistaken scientific theory, which has lead to a bias against epigenetics.
- trendia 9y ago
  But even epigenetics does not cover all of the ways that derived traits can be passed. For instance, prenatal testosterone levels affect the baby [0], yet those same levels may be affected by the mother's environment. Hence the environment may have effect on lifespring through means other than just epigenetics. [0] http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2015-09-23/masculine-face-linked-to-testosterone-levels-in-womb/6795422 http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2015-09-23/masculine-face...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - toasterlovin 9y ago
    Prenatal testosterone can alter the baby's phenotype, but can it alter the baby's genotype? Something has to alter the baby's genotype (more specifically, the genes in germ line cells, which are the only cells whose genetic material gets passed on to offspring) in order to count as a method of heritability. Otherwise prenatal testosterone is the same as any other thing in the environment which can alter an organism's phenotype.

stcredzero 9y ago

There's another kind of heredity which it's very important to discuss, with regards to opposing certain problematic ideologies. (Both far left and far right.) For human beings, culture, as a powerful multiplier of intelligence, is far more important than genes. Immigrant groups to the US, like Italians and Poles, increased their average IQ scores by about a whole standard deviation in about 2 generations in the early 20th century. Even hot-button topics, like the IQ scores of Black people in the US have data which suggest that it is culture which is both a source of great inertia/difficulty and a source of great hope. On the side of hope, one study found that the Black children of US service-people in Germany were the same as other children growing up in Germany. Likewise, evidence for cultural factors in the success of people in various fields is very strong. For example, Jewish immigrant communities have often dominated local tailoring industries in cities across thousands of years of history and several continents. However, it would be laughable to suggest the existence of a tailoring gene. Information of the kind above has been suppressed by the Far Left in the West. It has also been taken up in a dishonestly distorted form by the worst fringes of the Alt-Right. However, the complete story demolishes both Far Left and Alt-Right ideological messages. In the power of culture, there is hope for the future. If the potato famine Irish could lift themselves to their current place in 21st century society, out of utter unemployable status, poverty lower than that of the contemporaneous American slave, and the sewage-smelling crime and terrorism-ridden slums of New York and London, there is nothing that cultural transmission can't do. http://a.co/6K2o7XS http://a.co/6K2o7XS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr9GRgRw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHr9GRgRw_M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w0X71d9Z08 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w0X71d9Z08 (Also herein is a cautionary tale. History shows many, many examples of migrant groups who find themselves lagging behind. They are often kept in cultural isolation away from the mainstream of their local society, often, by their own elite, which uses this to maintain their status as group leaders. Culture is powerful, but its power can be harnessed to do great harm as well.)

toasterlovin 9y ago
I think it's always handy to keep in mind that human culture is a result of genetics.
- 9y ago

xr4ti 9y ago

I don't see why this should be very surprising to people. It's not difficult to think of heritable traits that have nothing to do with genetics such as: social status, money/property, spoken language, etc. Biological phenomena exist on molecular, cellular, organismal, population, and planetary scales. The assumption that genetics would be the only mode of entanglement would seem to be overly reductionist.

toasterlovin 9y ago
Heritability has a different meaning from how you are using it. A trait is heritable if a child displays the trait regardless of their environmental milieu. So, language is not heritable because the language you speak depends solely on the environment you grow up in; the child of English speakers will speak Spanish if they are raised in an environment where only Spanish is spoken. Height, on the other hand, is heritable, because, absent major malnutrition, the child of tall parents will be tall regardless of the environment they grow up in. And regarding status and wealth: genetics probably play more of a factor in these than you think.
- thraway180306 9y ago
  I find your confident view loaded. How can you say what heritability means ontologically, when the only way of ascertaining it is through mathematical statistics that doesn't care about your distinctions between genetic or cultural origins of the effects. Unless very carefully controlled, which is apparently too much to ask form the crude tools used in these studies. Specifically about height you are mistaken this is clear-cut. First there is influence if populace is not under closure. Immigrants and emigrants affect height. A study that controlled for this was taken on pretty stable populace of Norway. Since height is also perceived as attractive and matters in sexual selection it was no surprise that Norse rose 10 cm over a century, or 2.5 cm in a generation. For such an effect to work exclusively through selection though the average height of parents must have been several centimetre higher than the average height of populace! The magnitude of the effect is just too large to work solely through selection at that pace. Thusly it is to be concluded that height is not purely genetic but also an environmental adaptation, both captured in heritability.

learnstats2 9y ago

Contrary to some other comments, heredity by definition excludes culture. Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability. The goal is to take culture out of the consideration and look at the biology. (You may argue how successful this can be, but it is the goal, and it is what is meant by ‘heredity’) It’s reasonable to expect/have learned that all heredity must come through genes - which the headline illustrates - but we are starting to explore other mechanisms for heredity. The article makes no comment on cultural transmission, which is entirely an independent concept.

thelamest 9y ago
You can neither manipulate nor naturally observe the full range of possible cultural variation, though. And this problem will in fact inflate the additive genetic estimates. Ie. if we only observed plants in 21% oxygen, or never modified diets in phenylketonuria, we'd miss something important (in these simple cases, we knew it from other sources, but it's rarely this easy).
balance_factor 9y ago
> Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability. And how often does this happen? It is about as common as a sighting of the Higgs boson - and you need a large sample group. Of "identical" twins separated at birth (identical twins are not genetically identical) and sent to two culturally/class-based different families, with little contact. The Pioneer Fund (you can read about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_Fund ) funded studies like the Minnesota Twin Family Study, but it was found to have many deficiencies, such as what I noted. Often twins in the cohort were only raised apart for a few years and so forth. On occasion I watch television, and see wealthy heirs like the Hilton heiresses or Kardashian heiresses, or watch documentaries like Born Rich with various heirs and heiresses, and it's quite obvious why such a class spends its money on endeavors that says nature rules over nurture. Like the heir Wickliffe Draper did with the Pioneer Fund. That they are born superior without having to work or do anything. For the past ten millennia they said the gods favored them, like Socrates noble lie ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_lie#Plato's_Republic ). The popes crowned them king. In our post-enlightened age this does not work so now they say their superiority comes from chains of amino acids. Of course, history tends to depose of them any how, the God-ordained superior genetics of the Romanovs were not as well adapted as the Bolshevik soldiers who rid the earth of them (tangential note - their inbreeding caused hemophilia which brought in Rasputin and hastened their downfall). It's an argument for laziness and parasitism - to not look at people by their work, but by the genetic superiority which they were supposedly born with. It's pathetic and parasitic.

a_bonobo 9y ago

There is a bit of very recent, new epigenetics controversy in this preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/20/170506 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/20/170506 >Frequent lack of repressive capacity of promoter DNA methylation identified through genome-wide epigenomic manipulation tl;dr: they engineered a protein which methylates regions of the genome in human cells and checked how that affects gene transcription. In many cases where they showed that the gene's regulatory region was methylated were still transcribed, contrary to what many other studies are indicating. >These findings suggest that promoter DNA methylation is not generally sufficient for transcriptional inactivation, with implications for the emerging field of epigenome engineering. Perhaps methylation could be a footprint of something we don't know about yet.

yters 9y ago

If Lamarkianisn is true, then is intelligent design true?

daemonk 9y ago
How do those two things relate?
- yters 9y ago
  Lamarkianism claims animals manipulate their own genome to achieve a purpose. Intelligent design claims evolution exhibits purposeful change, which can be scientifically detected. Darwinian evolution claims all purpose is illusive, and merely a function of random variation and natural selection. Consequently, if Lamarkianism is true, then so is intelligent design.