2 ms·
When memories are consolidated at night during NREM sleep there's a lot of information transfer within the brain but not from the brain down to your gonads. Al
by Symmetry 8y ago
When memories are consolidated at night during NREM sleep there's a lot of information transfer within the brain but not from the brain down to your gonads. Also we can look at the DNA of a gamete and see how it differs from other cells and there are usually a few mutations but you can't encode much in <16 bits.
All this would have been reasonable speculation in the 1960s when Dune was written but science has moved on.
- klmr 8y agoI mean, you’re totally right to be sceptical of heritable learned experience but your description is off: Firstly, what do these 16 bits refer to (a single nucleobase encodes 2 bits of information and there are easily > 8 mutations from a given individual to the next)? Secondly, the posited mechanism for these acquired traits would be epigenetic, not genetic. I.e. it wouldn’t be encoded in genetic mutations but in other chemical modifications of the DNA (and, more generally, the gamete). This has conceptual and practical problems in itself (notably due to germline reprogramming) and as I explained in other comments, the current majority view in the field is that it plays a minor role in evolution at best. But it’s not fundamentally impossible and, at least under very specific and constrained circumstances in certain species, it does happen.