Darwin re-visited

[Michaelangelica]

Another bit of unusual "that's funny" research- Lamarkian?

We are what our parents ate

Monday, 02 February 2009

 

By having a good diet we can pass on a healthy epigenome to our children, the

researchers suggest.

 

 

Human cells have the ability to “remember” and replicate the effects of a poor diet on the body, providing a further clue as to why obesity and some diseases can run in families over generations.

 

“We now know that chocolate bar you had this morning can have very acute effects, and those effects continue for up to two weeks later, this is what we refer to as the burden of memory,” Associate Professor El-Osta said.

 

“The changes initiated by diet create a kind of “ghost” that lives within our genes, and that these epigenetic changes remember the effects of glucose and continue to respond to them for days or even weeks.”

 

The effect is a small chemical mark initiated by an enzyme. This enzyme “writes” a histone code that exists above our DNA and that code is driving what is now referred to as “metabolic memory”.

 

Associate Professor El-Osta and his team found that cells that showed profound changes in a high-glucose environment continued to exhibit those changes even when taken out of that environment. In fact, the cells demonstrated a “memory” of that high glucose event even when the same cells were returned to their previous state.

 

Studies were conducted in human aortic tissue and in mice, with the same results.

 

“Humans have only one genome and once the DNA sequence is written it doesn’t really change nor can we really control it, but, we actually have thousands of epigenomes which we can control, and, these epigenetics changes means what we eat and how we live can alter how our genes behave” Associate Professor El-Osta said.

We are what our parents ate(ScienceAlert)

[InfiniteNow]

David Attenboroughs Tree of Life video. Enjoy.

 

YouTube - Tree of Life video HD http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6IrUUDboZo

[Pyrotex]

Anotehr bit of unusual "that's funny" research- Lamarkian?...

Hmmm...

Cells can "remember" what you ate and its affects on your waistline?

And then "communicate" that (somehow) to the epigenetic machinery that controls the production of sperm or eggs?

:) :rolleyes: :cussing:

 

You know what that sounds like? Homeopathy:

Water can "remember" what it was in contact with, and pass on that "memory" to additional pure water, which can eventually pass on that "memory" to cells in your body, that will "communicate" that (somehow) to the organs and glands that control your immune system.

Yeah. Right. :)

 

From the (admittedly little) I've read on epigenetics, I just don't see this happening.

No juay, jose.

 

My understanding of epigenetics is that it concerns the machinery (typically in the female reproductive organs) that controls the initial development of the fertilized egg, zygote, and on into the foetus stage. Different genes in the fertilized egg must be activated at different times. Chemicals released by the mother trigger the start of several of the development cycles.

 

Furthermore, the embryonic environment can also turn on and turn off some of the zygote's genes so that it will develop with or without certain proteins. This may sound like it could pass on "new features" to the zygote, influenced by the mother's experiences, but (my understanding is) this is not how it works. What it does is enable or disable established, "known" or "standard" genetic features. It is not a "wide-open", "anything-can-go" system.

 

Correct me if I'm wrong. Can anyone else bring some more light to this subject?

[Symbology]

 

You know what that sounds like? Homeopathy:

Water can "remember" what it was in contact with, and pass on that "memory" to additional pure water, which can eventually pass on that "memory" to cells in your body, that will "communicate" that (somehow) to the organs and glands that control your immune system.

Yeah. Right. :lol:

 

Yeah... pretty silly. It's a good thing that the Mississippi river can't remember all the things that have happened to it along the way. Otherwise it would be deadly toxic by the time it got to the delta in New Orleans! And then it would communicate all those bad experiences into the pure water in the ocean.

 

 

.... oh wait a minute. It is deadly toxic. :blink: :edizzy: :evil: :shocked: :edepress: :esick: :confused:

[Pyrotex]

Yeah... pretty silly. It's a good thing that the Mississippi river can't remember all the things that have happened to it along the way. :evil: Otherwise it would be deadly toxic by the time it got to the delta in New Orleans! And then it would communicate all those bad experiences into the pure water in the ocean.

.... oh wait a minute. It is deadly toxic...

:edepress: :shocked:

 

Hoo-boy! That was a good one.

And as the Mississippi River diffuses into the oceans, getting ever more dilute, the "memory" of all those toxic chemicals gets stronger and stronger, because that's how homeopathy is supposed to work. Add in all the rains all over the Earth, and the "memory" must be so strong now that a single drop of Atlantic water should drop you dead in five seconds.

 

And epigenetics works the same way? :confused: hmmmmmm...

[Essay]

Another bit of unusual "that's funny" research- Lamarkian?

We are what our parents ate(ScienceAlert)

 

This is all a semantic problem... and not at all like homeopathy....

...generated by the valiant attempt of a newsperson to convey some scientist's excited explanation about the vast potential of epigenetics.

 

I can tell what the scientist was saying just by seeing the images that the newsperson awkwardly used.

I can see how the newsperson took the scientist a bit too literally....

 

just google: epigenetics grandmother

 

i.e.,

Germ cells carry the epigenetic benefits of grandmother's diet

SpringerLink - Journal Article

===

 

Pyro, I think earlier you defined: "Lamarckism is the theory that "experiential stress" can cause a "directed" change to DNA."

 

Sounds Good...

...and Epigenetics is the study of how "experiential stress" can cause a "directed" change to the regulatory molecules which modulate the expression of DNA.

...sometimes affecting that expression for several generations (the grandmother thing, above).

["directed" is a bit of an overcharacterization, but predictable, programmed, set or fixed, would work well....]

===

 

At least the news article puts quotes around those words, "remember," "ghost," "writes," and "memory."

 

The editor should have put quotes around "code" and "above" in this sentence:

"This enzyme “writes” a histone code that exists above our DNA and that code is driving what is now referred to as “metabolic memory”."

 

"...now referred to as “metabolic memory”."

When did this get decided, and by whom? ...Aack! Newspeople!!

===

 

just...

google: histones methylation epigenetics

 

~ :evil:

[Symbology]

 

Hoo-boy! That was a good one.

And as the Mississippi River diffuses into the oceans, getting ever more dilute, the "memory" of all those toxic chemicals gets stronger and stronger, because that's how homeopathy is supposed to work. Add in all the rains all over the Earth, and the "memory" must be so strong now that a single drop of Atlantic water should drop you dead in five seconds.

 

And epigenetics works the same way? :) hmmmmmm...

 

I honestly don't know that much about homeopathy and had never heard of epigenetics till this conversation. But having friends that live in New Orleans and Memphis, and having flown up and down the Mississippi several dozen times, I can tell you that it is extremely polluted and deadly.

 

So the concept that a fluid would carry components from upstream seems quite logical, be they micro or macro.

 

I don't know why any of the theories would think it would get more concentrated at the bottom other than if you were to measure the toxin in the actual delta soil I bet it's off the charts.

 

I like that sound of the metabolic memory and changing the DNA based on experience. I came to that conclusion myself after playing the simulation game "Terrarium" several years ago.

 

It would be highly advantageous if a parent could pass on its successful decisions to life and death situations directly to its offspring.

 

We are just beginning to understand the decryption of the DNA at this point. Due to our ability to encrypt knowledge, I would not be surprised to find out that Nature has had us beaten on the subject for a few billion years.

[Pyrotex]

...We are just beginning to understand the decryption of the DNA at this point. Due to our ability to encrypt knowledge, I would not be surprised to find out that Nature has had us beaten on the subject for a few billion years.

i would truly hesitate to say that we are "just beginning". This gives the impression that what little we know NOW is insignificant and unreliable. That is not the case. We know an astounding amount of knowledge about DNA and its decryption processes. Certainly we do not know everything, but what we have now serves to explain so much, that we now wield that knowledge in new medical applications every year.

 

We know that codones code for amino acids, and that a sequence of codones codes for a protein (a sequence of amino acids). We know the major roles that enzymes and RNA play in "reading" the codones and creating those proteins. We know that in a nerve cell, the DNA for producing stomach cells and bile ducts is "turned off" -- and that in stomach cells, the DNA for producing nerve axons and the chemicals for triggering a nerve pulse are "turned off". We know that in the stem cell, all these DNA sequences are "turned off" and the tiny bit that is "turned on" enables the stem cell to recieve chemical messangers that eventually tell it what kind of cell it is to become. (epigenetics)

 

What we do NOT know (in the context of this thread) is how a phenotypical experience (a repetitive event that occurs only at the level of the entire creature) can be translated into a chemical messenger that can tell a stem cell to "turn on" the genes for high metabolism and "turn off" the genes for proteins that result in longer neck bones.

 

How many times do I have to hit you on the head with a wooden mallet before your children are born with thicker skulls?

[freeztar]

How many times do I have to hit you on the head with a wooden mallet before your children are born with thicker skulls?

 

:)

 

What if you just tapped the skull with the mallet and every generation you tapped a little harder? :)

 

Hopefully NS would take over and the idiots that subjected themselves to such trials would be quickly taken out of the mix.

 

Epigenetics does not equal experiential evolution.

[Galapagos]

Here is a video chat from bloggingheads.tv with PZ Myers and Abagail Smith in which they discuss/explain epigentics:

Bloggingheads.tv - diavlogs

 

Here is a good overall summary of epigenetics from PZ Myers:

Pharyngula: Epigenetics

And Larry Moran commenting on it(good points raised here):

Sandwalk: Epigenetics

 

And here are more comments from A. Smith on an article in SEED published by Eva Jablonka about epigenetics:

erv : ew... epigenetics in SEED...

Comments by Larry Moran as well:

Sandwalk: Epigenetics at <i>SEED</i>

Recently, an article was published in Newsweek making typically misinformed and strange claims about epigenetics, and it was torn apart by PZ Myers over here:

Pharyngula: Sharon Begley, how could you?

Usually, Begley is reasonably good on science, but her latest piece is one big collection of misconceptions. It reflects a poor understanding of the science and of history, in that it confuses long-standing recognition of the importance of environmental factors in gene expression with a sudden reinstatement of Lamarckian inheritance, and it simply isn't — she's missed the point of the science and she has caricatured Lamarck.

[...]

She's describing real and interesting phenomena, but it isn't new and it isn't revolutionary. These are results of plasticity and epigenetics, and we aren't having heart palpitations over them (you're also going to have a difficult time finding any "strict Darwinians" in the science community who are even surprised by this stuff). We load up pregnant women with folate and maternal vitamins and recommendations to eat well, and we tell them not to get drunk or smoke crack for a few months, because it is common sense and common knowledge that extra-genetic factors influence the health and development of the next generation. Genes don't execute rigid, predetermined programs of development — they are responsive to the environment and can express radically different patterns in different contexts. The same genes build a caterpillar and a butterfly, the difference is in the hormonal environment that selects which genes will be active.

 

It's the same story with the water fleas. Stressed and unstressed mothers switch on different genes in their offspring epigenetically, which lead to the expression of different morphology. It's very cool stuff, but evolutionary biologists are about as shocked by this as they are by the idea that malnourished mothers have underweight babies. That environmental influences can have multi-generational effects, and that developmental programs can cue off of the history of the germ line, is not a new idea, especially among developmental biologists....

 

And here is an excerpt from a book review published in Nature by Jerry Coyne on the role of epigenetics in evolutionary theory:

Access : Evolution's challenge to genetics : Nature

[...]

The first is epigenetics. Blumberg notes that larger male dung beetles roll larger balls of dung, which in turn nurture larger sons. He argues that "Such examples of nongenetic transmission of characters are now becoming commonplace and are helping solidify the notion that the heredity upon which evolution depends is more than just about genes." But we must be careful. Some adaptive 'epigenetic' phenomena, such as parental imprinting of chromosomes, which influences gene expression depending on which parent passed on the gene, are based on instructions in DNA. Other cases of epigenesis, such as the conformational changes of prion proteins, are of minor evolutionary significance. Still others, such as an ancestral cell's ingestion of the bacteria that evolved into mitochondria, were of immense importance in evolution but are infinitely rarer than adaptive changes based on genes. And in nearly all cases, epigenetic effects peter out after a few generations, unable to promote major evolutionary change. Perhaps the most serious criticism of epigenetics is that of the thousands of inherited mutations found in model organisms such as mice and fruit flies, virtually all reside in DNA.

 

So the take home message is that it isn't magic, it isn't part of some Lamarckian revolution despite what some sensational sources claim, and it is damned interesting!

I'm currently making my way through this Nature Reviews Genetics on epigenetics/soft inheritance, anyone with acces/who is intersted will appreciate this one:

Access to articles : Nature Reviews Genetics

[HydrogenBond]

This was taken from the paper presented by Michaleangelica; Rewriting the Genetic Text in Brain Development

 

There are at least 3 distinct ways that RNA editing can alter brain function in response to experience (learning) and contribute to the evolution of higher-order cognitive capacities. First by selectively editing codons and splicing signals in protein-coding sequences involved in modulating fast neurotransmission, the firing properties of neurons can be fine-tuned for appropriate neuronal output and neural network integration. Second, RNA editing can alter the processing properties and target specificities of microRNAs (miRNAs) and the RNA interference regulatory networks in which they participate. Third, RNA editing can modify the sequences and biophysical properties of a vast array of other gene products, notably pre-mRNAs and the large numbers of non-coding RNAs known to be specifically expressed in the brain and to play roles in many functional and regulatory pathways, including epigenetic phenomena associated with learning.

 

The possibility exists that DNA recoding – rewriting genome DNA - is a central feature of both the immune and nervous systems. DNA recoding may be involved at the level of establishing neuronal identity and neuronal connectivity during development, learning and brain regeneration. And it appears that the brain, like the immune system, also changes according to experience.

 

Mattick and Mehler suggest that the potential recoding of DNA in nerve cells (and similarly in immune cells) might be primarily a mechanism whereby productive or learned changes induced by RNA editing are rewritten back to DNA via RNA-directed DNA repair. (See the latest model of RNA-directed recoding of DNA proposed for the immune system [5] by Ted Steele at Australian National University Canberra). This effectively fixes the altered genetic message once a particular neural circuitry and epigenetic state has been established.

 

If you look in terms of evolution, the affect of human religion was to detach the brain of the human animal away from the sensory connections of previous evolution. Pre human, before the religion, might see a tree. With religion and gods, the tree now has soul, spirit, can change shapes, etc. The memory created, is not only what enters the sensory systems like an animal, but is also connected to how humans subjectively perceive the event in light of an altered reality, implicit of gods. The result, is the RNA editing and the neural structuring of memory was altered away from logical extrapolation.

 

Darwin applies well with animals, but social Darwinism never adds up properly. The reason might be the effect of religion on the brain. It changed the neural wiring in the human brain because it added a wild card variable not in the rest of nature.

 

Hypothetically, if we had gone from caveman, right to logic and science, and had skipped religion over the past 7000 years, the sensory input, in the light of reason, may have just extrapolated from the animals. Social Darwinism might even apply. But it took a detour because of religion, adding a wild card variable that broke the continuity of the neural evolutionary chain. Social Darwinism no longer adds up very well.

 

Let me give an example. The animal may see food and feel hungry. With a human, if this was god's food, the object can cause fear. Animals will continue to evolve building on this food theme. Human's broke the chain of millions of years of logical extrapolation, allowing the neural pathways to go in another direction without any precedent. This eventually gave humans free choice.

 

In modern times, we are trying to wire back to the animal, but from a position of free choice. Without that religion step, we would not have that option. We would just follow the extrapolation of millions of years of animal evolution. To summarize the RNA editing and perhaps the DNA editing, because of the wild card variable of religion, altered the natural path of the brain.

[Buffy]

Been busy folks, but looks like you've all been having fun!

 

Bio has re-enunciated his front-loading hypothesis which he and I "discussed" long ago and it still presents the following dilemma for his argument:

• On the one hand, it argues for the notion that much of the genetic information in DNA has indeed been there for a long time.
  
• On the other hand, he insists that this information is "flat" and has no interrelationships with other parts of the genome: in other words, *all* of the variation we see must have been "front-loaded" because, in his view, there's no way to get the variation except to start over from scratch which is highly improbable.
  

 

This is the basic point I was making in my last post--and is littered among the many debates Bio and I have had in the past--that DNA is:

• Part of a system that is highly integrated into it's environment of proteins, chemical reactions, cell environments, and thus represents only part of the picture.
  
• An Engine for building organisms, not just a "random recipe" for a specific being.
  

Why is DNA so similar among widely divergent species? Because it's a well-developed mechanism for generating new ones.

 

In other words, it--along with *all* the stuff around it that makes it do its thing--is a Turing Machine for organisms. Slightly more complex, but amazingly straightforward in many respects.

 

The most important aspect of this relative to Bio's argument is that much of DNA represents "subroutines" that use "random mutation" as input. Bio has in the past argued strenuously that this is not the case, but that radical changes in DNA are required to generate the significant morphological changes that we see between species and which are necessary to explain historical events like the Cambrian explosion.

 

But if one recognizes the fact that change in even a *single sequence pair* in DNA can produce huge morphological changes, it becomes obvious that this "modular programming model" of evolution is well substantiated. The article "From Atoms to Traits" in the January 2009 issue of Scientific American actually has several wonderful examples of this.

 

In addition, DNA also contains experiments in modifications around for amazingly long periods of time, that may have been "tried" and then hidden away as recessive traits and then driven off to the misnamed "junk" DNA which become tremendously useful when environmental stresses require organisms to change rapidly or die trying. This is precisely why when the meteor hits or the supervolcano goes off, that we see *very rapid* changes in morphology, when quite frankly we see very little during more copacetic periods of history.

 

Why has--as Bio has often asked--there been no "evidence of speciation?" Mostly because there's no need for it at the moment. With Global Climate Change, expect so see a lot more!

 

But back to the issue of "complexity" which Bio brought up earlier, because it really is the crux of the issue in explaining large and rapid changes as described by Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould in their theory of Punctuated Equilibrium which Bio often uses as a "seeming contradiction" with the fact that mutations "only affect single gene pairs.

 

As I just stated, it's clear that DNA does indeed have an "engine" that can utilize small changes to create large morphological changes. But we need to validate this from another viewpoint that I touched upon in my previous post, which is the notion of *relationships*--or to be more specific in addressing the *statistical* argument, *dependence of variables*--between many disparate parts of DNA. mtRNA is very efficient in preventing certain changes to DNA from being instantiated, even before "selection" is required, and while there are indeed many "single pair" traits, many other traits have been described in recent genome research that include relationships between sets of genes.

 

When you start to try to apply a statistical argument--"the likelihood of all these changes happening in concert"--you need to recognize that these relationships as well as the fact that they exist in an environment that is hostile to certain changes while being indifferent or encouraging of others means that all statistical analysis that assumes the combination of independent probabilities is meaningless. I have tried to explain this to Bio before, but I have not gotten through, so I thought I'd try to come up with a simple, real-world example of the kind of problem this poses, that becomes unclear when people are trying to discuss already complex and hard-to-relate-to mechanisms such as DNA.

 

SO, join me in my little square kilometer of forest with trout stream....

 

I frequent a wonderful square kilometer of forest up in the Easter Sierra's that has a trout stream in it. I like to catch trout and eat them, but I have a problem. I have to find them. Consider the following data:

• The space is a square kilometer, 1000 meters on a side. My problem space includes creatures living in that space, and its reasonable that they will live no more than 10 meters underground (to bedrock) or 40 meters above ground, thus providing a 3D space of 50 million cubic meters.
  
• Within that square kilometer is a 1000 meter stream, averaging 1 meter across and 0.5 meters deep.
  
• There are 10 trout in that square kilometer.
  

Now I make an *outrageous* hypothesis: the trout will most likely be found in the stream.

 

There turn out to be two ways to compute the probabilities here:

• The independent probabilities approach says: the chances of anything in the 50 million cubic meter forest being in the 500 cubic meter stream is [imath]\frac{500}{50,000,000} = 0.00001 = 0.001\%[/imath] If we make the assumption that all probabilities are independent, then to find the likelihood that ALL 10 trout are in the stream, we multiply this probability ten times, and thus the total probability is [imath]0.00001^{10} = 1 \times 10 ^{-50} = 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001\%[/imath].
  
• The correllated probabilities approach recognizes that trout spend about 100% of their lives in water and never get more than a 20 cm out of it jumping, usually less than 5 seconds a day (86,400 seconds). Thus the probability of the trout being somewhere out of the water is [imath]\frac{5s}{86400s}= 0.0000579 = 0.0058\%[/imath] Thus the likelihood that all 10 trout are in the water is [imath](100\%-0.0058\%)^{10} = (99.9942\%^{10}) = 99.94214\%[/imath]. (For the mathematically inclined, note that I've made the *mistake* here of assuming that jumping is independent, while those of us who fish know that those trout jump only during "feeding time" (usually when the mosquitoes are feeding on me!)).
  

While this is a different and not directly analogous example, it is exactly the trap that those who claim "high improbability" go wrong: not recognizing the interdependence of the various probabilities involved.

 

The point being, if you foolishly ignore the lack of independence between variables, the "virtually impossible" becomes "near certainty."

 

Bio, I've asked you many times in the past, but you're going to have to explain why all of the elements are independent before your reductio ad absurdum requiring an inherent design is necessary to the data we see!

 

Man can believe the impossible, but man can never believe the improbable, :phones:

Buffy

[HydrogenBond]

The correlation of the formation of neural memory being connected to specific adjustments at the cellular level and perhaps all the way to the DNA, via RNA, seems to indicate cause and affect relative to an environmental need. If these neural changes were random, memory would also be random. If you tried to remember a cat, random genetic integration should end up as dog, dirt, sun, moon, but it doesn't. There is a direct cause and affect between input and affect.

 

If we extrapolate that to an adaptation to the cold, for example, the current theory assumes a random genetic change among a group with perhaps one of the group having the correct memory. The cold affects every mind and changes the brain specifically to the memory of the affect. There is not only one critter remembering cold with the rest randomly thinking apple, orange, dirt, etc. The brain will manipulate genetics in a cause and affect way, via repeatable memory.

 

If you think about sex and the genitals there is both feedback and feedforward. This area of the body is rich in sensory nerves and it can also be induced into activity using sensory input or with the mind via the imagination. This suggests a broadband link between the two. Structural nervous signally (cold) is traveling down the broadband connection influencing the formation of gamete cells to influence the genetic alternation needed to deal with the original input.

 

“Sperm-mediated gene transfer” has been well documented by Italian researcher Corrado Spadafora [9] as a process whereby new genetic traits are transmitted to the next generation by the uptake of DNA or RNA by spermatozoa and delivered to the oocytes at fertilization. The interaction of exogenous nucleic acids with sperm cells is mediated by specific factors, among which, a reverse transcriptase that generates “retro-genes” through reverse transcription of exogenous RNA or through sequential transcription, splicing and reverse transcription of exogenous DNA. The result is to transmit low copy transcriptionally active extrachromosomal structures capable of determining new traits. Retro-genes can be further transmitted through sexual reproduction from founders to their F1 progeny as new genetic and phenotypic features, unlinked to chromosomes, and thus be generated and inherited in a non-Mendelian manner. Rare instances of retro-gene integration into the chromosome could also occur, providing further potential for evolution.

 

Rewriting the Genetic Text in Brain Development

 

The brain is the main computer of an animal. It should be able to extrapolate to what it needs to meet the stress even before it occurs. It may not have time to randomly wait for change. This transfer may not be very good in lower animals and may depend on some level of random but within a narrowing bandwidth of alternatives. Adaptation will not show a bunch of nonsense genetic changes.

[Michaelangelica]

i would truly hesitate to say that we are "just beginning".

I wouldn't.

I think we have just opened the door a little and peeked into a vast, richly furnished room in the Palace of Versailles. We think we know a lot because we keep making reductionist models of everything-'cause we are dumb.

EG/ie

"DNA just a binary code +2. What's the problem?"

 

Q1. Could Mitochondrial DNA either from mother or father(yes father) carry environmental 'Lamarking' type info?

Or to put it another way "Are the bugs/ Wee- Beastie bits we carry with us clever than us?"

 

Q?2. How about another "That's Funny" piece of Oz research (again) on Nano-life "Analogue DNA"?

(Thanks to Moontanman for pointing me to this)

Microscopy-UK full menu of microscopy and microscopes on the web

[Pyrotex]

Here is a video chat from bloggingheads.tv with PZ Myers and Abagail Smith in which they discuss/explain epigentics:

Bloggingheads.tv - diavlogs

 

Here is a good overall summary of epigenetics from PZ Myers:

Pharyngula: Epigenetics

And Larry Moran commenting on it(good points raised here):

Sandwalk: Epigenetics

 

And here are more ...

Outstanding resources!! Thanks a million!

I woulda repped you if'n I coulda.

[CraigD]

The correlation of the formation of neural memory being connected to specific adjustments at the cellular level and perhaps all the way to the DNA, via RNA, seems to indicate cause and affect relative to an environmental need.

This is a very strange claim, HBond! Do you have any support for it?

 

I’m unaware of any theory or evidence suggesting that experiences sensed and stored as memories by the nervous system can case any change whatever to ones DNA. Almost certainly, everything know about neuroanotomy and physiology indicates that changes to DNA have not role in memory, while no mechanism or evidence know to microbiology has ever shown a change to DNA as the result of experience. In short, once combined to form the nucleus of a fertilized egg, DNA appears to be purely a “read only” source of data, with the exception of damage, random transcription errors, and insertions of foreign sequences by retroviruses and other pathogens.

If these neural changes were random, memory would also be random. If you tried to remember a cat, random genetic integration should end up as dog, dirt, sun, moon, but it doesn't. There is a direct cause and affect between input and affect.

Obviously, nervous systems do not form memories randomly. As noted above, however, “genetic integration” of memories is nowhere to my knowledge supported by scientific theory or evidence, but rather is pure (and rather bad) science fiction.

 

Again, HBond, if you know of any accepted scientific theory to the contrary, please post it. If these are purely your own ideas, however, please don’t try to pass them off as accepted science, and be prepared to either conduct original scientific research in pursuit of them, or have them considered strange claims.

[HydrogenBond]

Actually this is abased on an article that was posted by Michaelangelica that can be found at this link:

 

Rewriting the Genetic Text in Brain Development

 

The article stops short of saying the genetics in the brain cells is altered, although this seems to be what some researcher are suggesting, so it was mentioned to get the system used to the water. You know how they can get. I was suggesting the article of rewriting the genetic text in the brain shows an example, where genetic changes have a sense of direction.

 

At the end of the article it talks about sperm mediated gene transfer, which I never knew about but also seemed logical. The two events suggested the nervous link between the two may play a role. I also assume this occurs in forming female gamete cells since there is more time to tweak the genes needed for adaptation in the next generation.