3 ms·
There is also a lot of activism masquerading as science in the field of epigenetics, enough so that the journal Cell issued a warning about it: https://www.cell
by ghostcluster 8y ago
There is also a lot of activism masquerading as science in the field of epigenetics, enough so that the journal Cell issued a warning about it: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00286-4 https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(14)00286-4
- tim333 8y agoThere have been interesting animal experiments which perhaps avoid that eg >Perhaps the most intriguing animal paper so far is a study published online in the winter of 2013 that appeared to show that fear memories can be inherited. Researchers from Emory University trained male mice to associate an odor with an electrical shock, so that they would get startled simply by smelling the odor by itself. Surprisingly, the scientists found that the smell also startled the next two generations of mice. https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/5927269/epigenetics-definition-cancer-diet-explained-inheritance-DNA-methylation https://www.vox.com/2014/8/18/5927269/epigenetics-definition...
- phkahler 8y agoDid they rule out learning the behavior from the parent mice?
- goodmachine 8y agoThis presupposes that the senior mouse, having been exposed, can describe both a particular smell and the appropriate response to a junior mouse. So I'd guess that's ruled out already.
- klmr 8y agoYes, by raising pups with surrogate parents. However, the study was criticised for other reasons (lack of statistical power, no explanatory mechanism) and, in the intervening years, nobody has successfully replicated this experiment.