"There's new evidence that historical trauma is passed down through changes to the genome!"
"Genome or epigenome?"
"...epigenome."
I feel like I read of a similar study every few years, the first I can recall was 'Transgenerational response to nutrition, early life circumstances and longevity'[1], and it is always needlessly disappointing to thumb through past the headline and read that, inevitably, the media has decided to report this as a change to the genome when the actual research suggests otherwise.
Epigenetic changes are interesting in their own right! But they don't change human genes, at most they change gene expression.
I work as an editor sometimes. I've worked in technical writing, though not specifically science journalism.
My guess for why this keeps happening, is that it's a two-step process, fueled by a failure of communication:
1. The science writer themselves does understand epigenetics — but doesn't think it's important to the point the article is making for the reader to understand epigenetics. The writer wants to remove the requirement/assumption of "understanding epigenetics" from their writing, while still being technically correct in everything they say. So they choose to gloss an epigenetic change as "causing changes to the DNA." (Which it certainly does! Either chemically — to the DNA molecules themselves, through methylation; or structurally/topologically — through modifications to the histones around which the DNA is wrapped.)
2. The science writer's not-so-scientific editor comes along, doing a stylistic editing pass; sees the word "DNA"; and says "hey, that's jargon, and we're aiming for accessibility here — we need to replace this." And they (incorrectly) decide that a valid 1:1 replacement for "DNA" is "genes" or "genome."
This invalidating change could be caught... if the publication had a formal workflow step / requirement for the editor to perform a back-check with the original writer after copyediting + stylistic editing, to ensure that validity has not been compromised. I believe that big-name science journals and science magazines do tend to have these back-check steps. But smaller publications — like the PR departments of universities — don't.
I can't speak for every institution, but our PR department does as many back and forth passes as it takes for the scientists who did the work to sign off that any edits made still preserve scientific accuracy.
> The science writer themselves does understand epigenetics — but doesn't think it's important to the point the article is making for the reader to understand epigenetics
That's not a valid defense, otherwise they could write with a straight face that sun exposure causes genetic changes that make you darker, and how your descendants will inherit those changes too. It is dishonest writing, bordering on disinformation. Said article would attract clicks and attention like a cursed magnet, though.
If the editor is only editing for style and readability while adding factual mistakes along the way, they could be entirely replaced with ChatGPT in a tight loop with the science writer. Write article -> make style changes -> writer reviews again for correctness.
It’s inexcusable that the quality of science communication is so low.
These studies are at the interface of genetics, sociology, and political action. They are underwhelming in all three domains. The genetics are based in puny sample sizes, and this has been true going back to the Yehuda study (2015, PMID: 26410355) and remains true of this broader followup (42 controls and only 18 in the germline exposure group). I do not understand designing experiments like this and taking the results seriously, unless we move on to sociology and political action; in which case the motivation is clear:
“…may encourage policymakers and humanitarian agencies to provide targeted resources to vulnerable populations…”
Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to decide who gets “healthcare access, special lodging, sanitation, and nutrition”? No, never.
One could get a lot further a lot faster doing well controlled experiments in animal models. But even here the sociological context intrudes. Mike Meaney’s original work in the early 2000s is still open to questions.
> Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to decide who gets “healthcare access, special lodging, sanitation, and nutrition”? No, never.
I don't think the activism/sociological angle here was supposed to be interpreted as being about targeted reconciliation toward existing victims of violence / their descendants. Even if those people are potentially "living life on hard mode" as a result of previous violence. (After all, finding and helping those people would require complex infrastructure and lots of money.)
Rather, I think the thrust of the implicit activist argument would be closer to:
1. Experiencing violence turns out to be even worse for you than we thought — and in non-recoverable ways! (You can't therapy your way out of epigenetic changes.)
2. And so more should be done to prevent/ameliorate violence and its impact on people, before it can cause durable epigenetic changes;
3. ...and some "low-hanging fruit" in reducing this impact for minimal cost, would be to supply more resources for escaping/coping with violence (e.g. shelters; crisis lines; social workers; restraining orders that actually work) specifically to groups who are demographically most likely to become victims of violence.
4. And perhaps we can even use this correlation we've found to also measure the effectiveness of interventions like these — sampling the trends in epigenomic changes in these vulnerable populations over time (i.e. a repeated cross-sectional study), to know if marginal increases in certain types of resources actually have measurable impacts on "cushioning" these populations from violence, enough to prevent these epigenetic changes.
These arguments sometimes reach juries, who are asked to award damages based on "physical harms," in a separate category from "mental anguish."
The argument that "brains are rewired" or "generations of genetics are harmed" is popular in 'trauma informed' arguments for compensation or government help.
> But they don't change human genes, at most they change gene expression.
It's not clear in this case what the difference is between gene, gene expression, and gene encoding. What does gene mean if it does not imply either encoding or expression? If this is a disagreement about the semantics of encoding, surely it'd be easiest to express this in terms of encoding. If this is about gene expression, surely it'd be easiest to express this in terms of expression. "gene" largely has no meaning outside of encoding/expression.
It seems clear to me the article is indicating a distinction of encoding. I'm not sure where the ambiguity is.
First, a point of clarification: coding and encoding are two different things. "Encoding" is a CS term that doesn't come up much in biology. (You could say that DNA is an encoding of a base-4 number sequence.) "Coding" is a bioinformatics term — DNA base-pairs code for particular RNA sequences; and then, only if they're in a coding region. (Analogy: flux patterns on a floppy disk code for particular bytes, but only if they're in a sector.)
Second: what are genes? A "gene" is an abstraction.
Let's first define a "genome". A genome is the complete dump of raw data of "what the DNA base-pair sequence string says" — before any coding or expression occurs. Whenever we sequence DNA, it's [parts of] this raw base-pair string that we get back — not the codons, not the expressed RNA sequences. And this is why we care — sequencing is the tool we have, so it's the lens by which we look at DNA. And that lens shows us the raw data.
When we talk about "genes" (or "SNPs" / other bioinformatics terms), we're basically talking about the ways in which that raw data we can extract through sequencing, relates to observed phenotypic changes. A "gene" is a particular part of a "genome" (DNA base-pair sequence) that can be uniquely identified as being the cause of interesting phenotypic consequences when changes are made to it. (Which in turn is how we figure out what genes are "responsible for" doing what.)
Note how these concepts, "genome" and "gene", both completely ignore epigenetics / gene expression. That's because these terms were invented before epigenetics was invented, and these terms are part of a model that uses a lens (DNA sequencing) that itself ignores epigenetics. Gene sequencing shows you the world of DNA as if epigenetics didn't exist.
Now let's talk about DNA.
If you think that epigenetics is about changing how DNA encodes information, then you might be thinking of "DNA" via the lie-to-children model, of it just being a long sequence of nucleotides.
But consider: why do chromosomes look the way they do — little X shapes? A long string of base pairs, on its own, has no reason to assemble into that macroscopic shape.
This is because "DNA" — which is really a shorthand for "the DNA complex" (i.e. a complex of multiple weakly-bound molecules that together form the chromatin of a chromosome) — is not just nucleotide base-pairs. The nucleotide base-pairs form one molecule (the deoxyribonucleic acid string itself); but then you've got other stuff. You've got histones — little tape-spools the DNA string is wrapped onto. You've got methyl groups — little markers hanging off particular places on the DNA string. You've got other stuff I don't personally understand/know about.
When lay-people talk about "DNA", they're really referring to the whole complex of molecules that makes up each one of your chromosomes.
"Genes" are just the bioinformatic data representation of the deoxyribonucleic-acid-base-pair-string part of that complex of molecules.
But gene coding, and gene expression, are both a result of what the other molecules in that complex are doing.
(Think about it: if gene coding + expression were encoded in-band by the DNA itself, then that information would be appear in DNA sequencing — and so we'd be unable to differentiate that information from changes to the DNA itself — and so we wouldn't even have a concept of "epigenetics", because it would all just look like "genetics"!)
Histones — those little tape spools — attract or repel each-other due to chemical modifications to the histones themselves. Two histones that "snap together", prevent the region of DNA "tape" between them from being physically accessed by the RNA polymerase enzymes that "read the tape" to produce RNA.
Methylation markers hang off of the initial "landing sites" for RNA polymerase enzymes (CpG dinucleotides — think "floppy-disk sector header"), and repel them.
When you sequence DNA, you ignore these transcription-silencing signals. You can picture DNA sequencing as "unrolling" the deoxyribonucleic acid off of its histone carriers, rendering them irrelevant; and then using molecular tools to read the sequence — tools that, unlike RNA polymerase, are not repelled by methyl-groups.
If you use more-modern techniques to capture this additional information about where these silenced regions are, and by what mechanism they've been silenced, then you get what we call an "epigenome" — which isn't a post-translated version of DNA, but rather sort of a "metadata track" that runs parallel to the DNA "data track."
(And you can, in theory, combine the two to calculate an "expressed genome." I don't think we've ever done that yet — partly because "whole-epigenome sequencing" doesn't yet exist in the way that "whole-genome sequencing" does; and partly because epigenetic metadata is probabilistic — with some modifications decreasing the probability of a region coding for something, rather than turning it off altogether — and so current approaches, that derive the epigenome "by reaction", would observe something like "weak bits" on a floppy disk — regions that read differently each time, requiring many passes to calculate a "flux strength" for each region and to find each silenced region's true borders.)
This is the sort of long-form comment that I'd write and love to read, signed in just to upvote it, well-put!
Nit: chromosomes mostly don't look like little X-shapes except during cell division, which was historically a useful time to image them (I think because the dye couldn't get through the cell-nucleus wall but during cell division it has dissolved?). But then you are seeing _two_ chromosomes that happen to be bound at a centromere before that centromere gets torn into two by the cytoskeleton dividing the cell in half.
I appreciate the effort you've put in above, but I think you're defining both gene and genome from too narrowly. Both terms predate our understanding of the structural mechanisms of heredity.
A gene is a unit of heredity.
The genome is the sum total of all genetic information in an organism.
Both are extremely loose terms. Individual sub-fields of biology/biochemistry may use more specific variations in specific contexts, but the definitions above cover all of those meanings.
The terms were essentially redefined more strictly as our understanding of genetics grew more refined.
(I.e. per my sibling post, there were jargon terms with these names that had one particular definition under an early, black-box mental model of heritability that is no longer used/favored; and there are new replacement jargon terms with the same names, that have a different definition under the more-modern mental model of germline heritability.)
After all, there are entirely non-genetic mechanisms of heredity. You inherit some of your mother's immune histochemistry through developmental exposure, and more through consuming breastmilk. Yet there is nothing that "codes" for this histochemistry; it's just a stateful process (mother's immune system) interacting with another stateful process (foetal immune system) — working almost more like a "colonization" of commensal bacteria than like gene transfer.
In terms of "heritable traits" — "nature vs nurture" — such effects appear squarely on the "nature" side. But they're not germline heritable. Implant the fertilized egg into a surrogate mother, and you get different histochemistry. Have a wetnurse feed the baby, and you get different histochemistry.
If these things are "genetics" — if the information carried by the state of immune cells in response to observing natal antigens is "genes" — then the term "genetics" has no useful meaning / is useless to talk about the thing we want to talk about when we talk about genetics. Where "what we talk about when we talk about genetics", is how an organism's breeding/germline ancestry, predicts phenotypic outcomes.
And if you agree that that is the thing we want to talk about — then epigenetic information isn't "genes" (under the germline-heritability model) either. Your epigenetics is hereditary, but only in the same sense that your immunohistochemistry is hereditary — being passed via exposure in a natal environment, rather than being "written into" the fertilized egg.
(Also — at least AFAIK — we don't even consider our nuclear mitochondrial DNA to be a part of our genomes. Even though it is passed through the germline, and is intensely important in many congenital metabolic dysfunctions. Because our mitochondria are not technically "us" — we might call them organelles, but they're still more like commensal prokaryotes in how cells treat them: dividing on a separate timeline from our cells; not assortatively assigned to daughter cells by spindle fibers during mitosis; not observed + checkpointed to ensure sufficient numbers exist for daughter cells before telophase; etc.)
> A "gene" is a particular part of a "genome" (DNA base-pair sequence)
See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans communicate. Regardless of if you're referring to "coding" or "encoding" (I'm not sure of the semantic difference between these two terms, frankly, nor an understanding why this distinction is worth presenting without remediation) a gene is still a heritable trait, not a specific span of a specific encoding of a specific molecule. A gene is, colloquially, a heritable trait that implies no specifics about how it's coded/encoded into whatever substrate you choose. You're referring to a far more specific term most people won't recognize as meaningful, and you can either explicitly describe what you're discussing or accept that people will misunderstand you.
I see you're trying to advocate for specific terminology to agree on, but it's far more effective to meet people where they already are rather than trying to push jargon onto others.
If I'm wrong, that people specifically refer to subsets of a DNA encoding by referring to "gene", please educate me.
You are not wrong but even among biologists and geneticists there are differences of opinion and differences of context. If a mouse geneticist says they knocked out gene X they usually mean that they inactivated the production of mRNA from a specific gene “model”. If you were talking to Richard Dawkins he would have a much more expansive definition of a “gene” that would include a much longer sequence of DNA (many protein-coding genes) that remains in a particular state long enough to be selected for (or not) or to drift to fixation or extinction.
It is not quite right to say:
“a gene is … a heritable trait.” This definition equates gene with trait. Yes that is how Mendel thought about his results since he could only see and quantify traits. But there are still a depressingly large number of protein-coding genes without linkage to traits.
We are not generally mouse geneticists, though. We are assumably a proxy for the general public.
> It is not quite right to say: “a gene is … a heritable trait.”
This is a reality of communication you need to deal with: that's absolutely how people will interpret the term "gene".
> Yes that is how Mendel thought about his results since he could only see and quantify traits. But there are still a depressingly large number of protein-coding genes without linkage to traits.
From my perspective, from my exceedingly humble opinion, "heritable trait linked by reproduction and not culture" is absolutely how the public at large understands the term "gene". The fact that scientists cannot successfully link protein-coding to linguistically-bound traits is an issue that scientists will have to work around when communicating about the specifics of heritability, genetic determinism, and discretization of individuals. "Gene" is simply not a term you can reliably link to DNA in the popular consciousness and is likely not worth the effort or money to redefine.
> See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans communicate.
No. There are two distinct ways in which humans communicate.
• Humans create and use words, whose usage stretches and spreads and grows and can only be defined descriptively.
• Humans (doing professional/technical/scientific work) also define-into-existence jargon terms — the meaning of which is set in stone at the moment of creation.
Jargon terms are verbal handles we use to grasp parts of particular, well-defined mental models — models that are taught and learned as coherent systems of such terms; models that exist to enable their users to think rigorously, and collaborate without corruption of meaning/loss of rigor, to "get things done" in those professional/technical/academic contexts.
Jargon terms, therefore, can always be said — definitively, objectively(!) — to have been employed correctly or incorrectly in any given text, per the mental model in which the jargon term is defined.
Sometimes, professionals/technical people/scientists are dumb and silly, and attempt to invent a jargon term made of words, where those words, put together in that order, have such an obvious, novel, and useful lay usage, that it is inevitable that anyone who hears the term will already think they know what it means, before ever being formally taught what it means.
"Begs the question" is an example of this — there is something so uniquely useful about the lay meaning of that phrase (essentially "a situation that demands that an unstated question be asked"), that whoever named (or more likely, translated from Latin into English) that logical fallacy, made a mistake by choosing to use those words to name it.
But that situation is rare.
Most of the time, professionals/technical people/scientists make up a word all on their own, to be jargon, entirely for their own use. (Often they use Latin for this, as an intentional way to dodge the aforementioned problem of the word "seeming like it has an intuitive meaning" in any living language. But they don't have to. They can also just make up a nonsense word, perhaps one inspired by a Latin prefix or something — a word like "gene.")
And then, through a pipeline of scientific discoveries, to science journalism, to pop-science, to regular people just talking about how their aunt has asthma due to "that bad gene she got from her father" — somewhere along the line, someone screws up in how they're using the jargon term; and that screwed-up understanding proliferates.
But jargon terms — at least the ones that are part of mental models anyone still employs any more — must still be used to do work. And they cannot function to do that work, if people can't use them with the implicit understanding that they are communicating an exact, precise, well-defined idea. Such words are not merely words; they are professional tools. The professionals that use these tools, cannot allow them to be corrupted, to have their meanings diffuse.
And so, at least the professionals themselves, will always be taught that any jargon term they learn has one specific meaning — that it acts as a handle for a particular concept in a particular mental model.
And those professionals will insist on this strictness when working with any technical writer or editor.
And this strictness diffuses from there, into any editorial context where editors consider themselves to be professionals, working for a publication that expects professionalism — whether that publication is technical or non-technical.
In professional editing, is always expected that if any term (word or phrase) is used which is known to be a (unique, non-colliding) jargon term rooted in some technical/academic mental model, then that term should only be permitted if it is being used with its original jargon meaning. Any other handling of such a term is considered a usage error, effectively a typo.
(For non-unique/colliding jargon terms where lay usage exceeds jargon usage, the lay-usage is given represented by plain printing, while the jargon usage is represented by italic printing. This only ever comes up with phrases — "begging the question" again — because even the most ivory-tower academics know that overloading the meanings of single extant lay words is a stupid way to invent jargon.)
This is a long spiel to justify refusing trying to communicate in an effective manner. I understand the concept of professionals recognizing the quality standards others put forward, but at some point you've got to care if you even come of as sensical to non-professionals if you want to communicate to them. This necessarily implies a reaction to something not being "but they misused the word gene!!!".
It doesn't matter when lay people misuse professional jargon. It matters when professionals speaking to lay people misuse professional jargon. (As was what was being pointed out as wrong about the OP article — it is professional writing, from the PR department of a university!)
In other words, it's about "those who know" being a role model for correct usage by "those who don't know."
(Why bother? Because then people are more likely to come into the profession with an understanding of the concept that's at least compatible with teaching them the model; rather than having an understanding of the model so debased that they need to actively unlearn it before they can learn the correct model.)
> What does gene mean if it does not imply either encoding or expression?
The less mutable part. The strongly heritable stuff. Genes are part of your body, as is your brain, that doesn’t mean your every thought is equivalent to DNA.
Having said that, there's some very recent research to suggest that memories / neuronal weights are actually encoded directly in neuronal DNA.
(this does not mean that this DNA is directly heritable, since it does not necessarily end up in the gametes, but it is still interesting that, yes, in fact, it involves DNA change)
Describing a change to DNA methylation "alters" a gene is technically correct in the sense that it is an change to the molecular structure of the DNA that makes up the gene, but is indeed misleading, because without further clarification a majority of people would assume it refers to a change in the gene sequence.
DNA methylation means adding one or more methyl groups to the DNA, so technically it is an alteration. But most people would assume that altering a gene specifically means changing the "letters" of the gene sequence that encode the protein, and that's not what DNA methylation does.
Personally, I think of DNA as being like the Linux kernel codebase. There's a lot of raw "code" there — but not all of it ends up in every running kernel!
DNA methyl-groups, acetylated histones, etc — these are the config file generated by running `menuconfig`. They determine:
1. which components of the kernel the "compiler toolchain" (RNA polymerase) will actually "compile" (transcribe) into kernel-module objects (RNA sequences, proteins) — in turn determining which "features" (developmental or metabolic processes) each of the components (cell/tissue types) of the resulting system (organism) will have; and
2. which #IFDEFs (coding regions) within those modules will actually be macro-enabled (expressed) during compile-time (transcription) — in turn influencing / varying / tuning the strategies and logic (frequency of production / likelihood of expression, final shape / folding / binding affinities of proteins) used by any given component (cell/tissue type) to perform a given "feature" (developmental or metabolic process).
(And just a tweak to steer this intuition pump — your body doesn't have one kernel, compiled once at conception; rather, your body is more like a distributed system composed of machines running Gentoo — every cell has its own kernel, and each cell is "tweaking" and "recompiling" its kernel regularly. When cells undergo mitosis, both daughter cells inherit these tweaks — that's like setting up a new one of these machines by mirroring the hard drive from an existing machine, carrying over not just the kernel but also the at-snapshot version of the `menuconfig` configuration file.)
The gene itself determines the shape and character of a protein; Gene expression refers to the quantity of a protein produced. Changes to the genome are long lasting and somewhat rare inside a living person, while changes to the epigenome happen fairly regularly.
A good way to think of this is cell differentiation. Every cell in your body, except eggs and sperm, contains a copy of your entire genome but what differentiates a nerve cell from a liver cell from a skin cell is gene expression. All it takes is some changes to the epigenome of a stem cell during mitosis for one the resulting cells to become a new, differentiated cell.
Imagine you have the text of a book in a word processor. You can change the text by typing new words or deleting ones that are there. You can also change the font, size, alignment, etc. The latter category of changes does not alter the words in the text, but it can affect how that text is interpreted, which parts of the text a reader focuses on, etc. The difference between a genetic alteration and an epigenetic alteration is conceptually similar. Genetics is changing the "text" of the genome while epigenetics is changing aspects of the genome that affect how that "text" is interpreted and used.
DNA is source code, and there is a bunch of RNA processes that read it and do stuff to make you live. Parts of DNA can be turned on and off, that’s called expression. Epigenetics is the study of how genes are expressed. Gene expression can change without the genome itself changing depending on external conditions, which is a key part of adaptability.
> they don't change human genes, at most they change gene expression.
This is an extremely pedantic distinction, especially since the article as a whole is pretty clear.
In nearly all cases, what matters is whether we're talking about information that is encoded and passed down. That's the case here, even if the encoding and persistance characteristics are different.
It's a crucial difference. Encoding and persistence in your genome means permanent changes, not for a few generations, PERMANENT. Epigenetic encoding and persistence is temporary, even if it expresses for more than one generation.
Crucial difference, one is a mutation, the other an environmental adaptation.
If this headline’s claim were true, why would it apply just to violence and not all experiences? Wouldn’t it imply that all kinds of activities alter genes? For example if you play sports, you might get one type of change and if you were a lawyer, you might get another kind of change and so on.
You should read the actual article, which provides necessary context and nuance, and not just the headline. The article is specifically discussing the effect of stressors caused by trauma (violence) on the transmission of genes from mother to child. The effect discussed does not generalize to all experiences.
Gene and geneome are expansive terms. The genome refers to the sum total of all genetic material in an organism. Epigenenetic markers such as methylations are part of the genetic material, and are therefore part of the genome.
You seem to be disappointed in the headline because you're expecting narrower definitions.
Although the article text doesn't claim genomic changes, the untitled graphic mentions "germline" in the "1980 Group" column. Not certain how to interpret that. I don't see the graphic in any publication of Mulligan, Panter and Dajani altogether.
Mulligan CJ, Clukay CJ, Matarazzo A, Hadfield K, Nevell L, Dajani R, Panter-Brick C. Novel GxE effects and resilience: A case:control longitudinal study of psychosocial stress with war-affected youth. PLoS One. 2022 Apr 4;17(4):e0266509. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0266509. PMID: 35377919; PMCID: PMC8979449.
Clukay CJ, Dajani R, Hadfield K, Quinlan J, Panter-Brick C, Mulligan CJ. Association of MAOA genetic variants and resilience with psychosocial stress: A longitudinal study of Syrian refugees. PLoS One. 2019 Jul 17;14(7):e0219385. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0219385. PMID: 31314763; PMCID: PMC6636744.
Panter-Brick C, Eggerman M, Ager A, Hadfield K, Dajani R. Measuring the psychosocial, biological, and cognitive signatures of profound stress in humanitarian settings: impacts, challenges, and strategies in the field. Confl Health. 2020 Jun 23;14:40. doi: 10.1186/s13031-020-00286-w. PMID: 32582366; PMCID: PMC7310257.
FAAH, SLC6A4, and BDNF variants are not associated with psychosocial stress and mental health outcomes in a population of Syrian refugee youth
Christopher J. Clukay, Anthony Matarazzo, Rana Dajani, Kristin Hadfield, Catherine Panter-Brick, Connie J. Mulligan
bioRxiv 685636; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/685636
> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
This seems like a pretty charitable read on policymakers. We inflict violence all the time that has multigenerational downstream effects without a genetic component and we don’t really care about the human cost, why would adding a genetic component change anything?
I'll quote Michael Douglas from Traffic, "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how you wage war on your own family". His daughter was knee deep in heroin addiction as he was tasked to criminalize everyone. By the end of the movie he was changed imo.
We have no way of giving such an experience to those in power. The best we can do going forward is pick more well rounded people, and no, that doesn't mean great schools and great wealth. You must be experienced in life.
That was a good film. I always remembered del Toro’s recommendation about bulling more lighted fields for kids. Chinese society could learn a lot about how gaming is actually not that addictive when you look deeper into the problem.
Getting off the rails here but I never get to talk about this movie!
When first watching that movie, I really didn't like it right until the last scene, with Michael Douglas and his daughter in rehab, with the line "My name is Robert. And my wife, Barbara and I are here to support our daughter Caroline. And we're here to listen."
It was such a simple yet clever way to end the movie and highlight a central theme in the movie, which is that the way to solve our problems isn't to demonize the people that caused them, but instead to listen to them.
It was weird, because it sort of retroactively made me really like the rest of the movie.
I feel like I'm willing to put up with a lot of the more slow-paced stuff if I know it's going somewhere. If I know that this is building up to an interesting theme, then I don't get bored.
I agree, and I think the militarization of the police has been a net negative on the US. It should be police action. East Asian countries have very low drug use rates because they deal with drug use appropriately. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a comparably far richer place, drug use is tolerated and the problem proliferates.
And you don’t need armored vehicles and SWAT teams to get to a better place.
You do not know the context and ignore many of the particular causes and events that led to this situation. Your assessment of the situation is very shallow, hence why you carelessly state an "opinion" that has nothing to stand on, one simple way to prove that is that in reality there is a war happening.
If you have trouble with anything there let me know and I'll gladly find a better way to explain it.
I have trouble with it. You have no idea where the other person is located (beyond the USA) and offer nothing to support your alternative point of view besides attacks on the other poster. Since you say there is a war happening and imply that you do know the context, perhaps you should share that information.
There is a war happening because we have waged it. We attacked the symptom with military gusto and ignored the problems that caused it. We made domestic policies that legislated morality and poured billions into the coffers of the cartels. We countered with billions spent in the military industrial complex and by militarizing the police. So yes, there is a war happening. Because that is how we framed it.
Billions of dollars were going to flow into the coffers of the cartels either way; the people want drugs, the cartels are willing to use violence in order to organize who gets to distribute and at what prices they sell. There's no such thing as a peaceful hard-drug manufacturing operation.
It shouldn't be a war on anything. Because we insist on treating adults like children, we're taking money that would have gone to tightly regulated pharmaceutical corporations like Bayer[1] and funneling it into violent criminal syndicates.
The "War on Drugs" is just a massive subsidy for the cartels via US markets. A sane approach to actually reduce drug use and fentanyl deaths would be to mirror the policies that have brought American tobacco use to a historic low and invest the tax revenue from legal narcotic sales into addiction treatment centers.
Portugal seems to legally distinguish between distributors and consumers just fine.
Perhaps there's some weight to the idea that demonization of distributors harms consumers—but this doesn't seem to be an ideological barrier between being aware of the harms to users and the obvious economic boon of taking advantage of regulation to exploit the market advantage.
It's a 24 year old movie. Around that time the history of the drug war involved a lot more petty criminalization (look how far we've come). This discussion can veer.
Even if it were just doing that (and I don't believe that's either the objective or the practical application, minor possession offenses targeting users are the vast majority of convictions), your street level dealer is so far down the chain to have no effect on supply and is a member of the community that you're hoping to help by imprisoning.
Ignoring the fact that the word "typically" was highly operative, he's a great example of the point you're trying to undermine. The government never would have gone away empty handed with no conviction of any sort like they did the first time they went after Menendez in the late 2010s. A normal peasant would have had their life ruined and been just barely scraping by in the 2020s when he was doing the things that ultimately got him put away.
I just find it odd to describe something that happens at the federal level on average once a year[1] as atypical. (And I'm sure even more frequently at the state level).
Convictions seem like a distraction from the narrative here: Menendez fucked over his constituents. Obviously every politician that does so should be equally castigated. The court is irrelevant in this context and should be considered a trailing symptom.
A simple policy could easily end those supply chains and large distributors. Just legalize it. Coke, meth, heroin. Legalize it, only allow it to be sold retail (no more street drugs), only allow licensed manufacturers to produce it, only allow them some very modest (capped at 2% over cost, maybe) profits. You get to choose where it's sold (out of liquor stores, most likely, instead of crack houses). You get to starve the cartels to death (they're cut out completely). No cops dying in shootouts, no dealers dying in shootouts, no bystanders dying in shootouts. And if you want tweekers to stop stealing copper wiring for scrap, just get rid of piss tests too... if drugs are so awful that people who give suck dick for it, then they're also so awful that people will get a minimum wage job scrubbing toilets for them. It's just that they can't because of piss tests.
Instead, we'll get another 100 years of half-assed decriminalization, where it's still illegal to sell, dealers are still motivated to kill cops, deadbeats, and rivals, where 100,000 people die because it's laced with fentanyl and even decriminalized illegal street drugs can't be regulated. I eagerly await all the downvotes this opinion will get.
100%. Decriminalizing possession only solves part of the problem: not ruining users lives even more than they have already done. Cracking down on dealers just incentives them to substitute stronger and more dangerous drugs in the pipeline.
One more change I would like to see: get rid of advertising this stuff. Giant billboards pushing alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, are bad for all of us.
The actual study is about exposure to pretty extreme violence during pregnancy having epigenetic effects beyond one generation to F4. This is the first study to ever present such evidence in humans since some caution is warranted here with any conclusions.
Humanity risks a global return to a state of gleeful cruelty. "Lupus est homo homini". [1]
The well-being of people is a characteristic of successful society. And labour is fundamentally valuable. For those who seek economic pre-eminence, it makes perfect sense to invest in the people doing the work.
However, there are narrow-minded groups and individuals who see another equation: put workers in an exploitable condition and keep them in such condition over generations. Wars have been fought to preserve the investment in maintaining such conditions.
Labour is valuable, but the individual cost in human life is usually dismissed through demagogy and populism. We had broken the historical cycle of misery, but we now risk the achievements of our civilisation.
Progress if often gradual and the result of continuous pressure over long periods of time. Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy, but I don't think "we'd have already seen it work" is a framing that makes sense.
Is it even desirable to avoid something nature selected for? The biggest assumption here is that these epigenetic mutations aren’t desirable for survival in a chaotic and violent world
Progress is completely random and arbitrary. Sometimes it zooms forward, other times it regresses. The universe has no mystical rules that demand that it continue.
>Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy
I don't even think we use the word "empathy" correctly. It makes sense to me when we're talking about a non-general empathy, where you see a particular person close to you (physically, if not emotionally) and you feel for them. You can't have empathy with some abstract hypothetical. You can't even have empathy for some large loosely defined group of people of the non-hypothetical sort. And, most of all, it's largely spontaneous. If you go into it having already decided you feel empathy for them "just on principle", then what you're feeling isn't empathy. It's performative. It's virtue signaling. Pretending that is empathy does empathy no favors, and it does no favors to the people who are supposedly being empathized with. Because it is performative, it's always just this thin veneer of compassion over an inadequately hidden contempt. Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so successfully that they believe that it's real empathy, the hatred is buried deeper but festers all the more for it.
Appeal to pragmatism instead of empathy. You can make rational arguments if you're trying to be pragmatic. Appeal to justice. Appeal to anything but empathy. When I hear the word "empathy", I know that I'm about to have a load of horseshit dumped on me. You all know it too, even if you're worried that other people will shun you if you admit it out loud.
Would you accept the argument that someone who for whatever reason doesn't have empathy would also not be able to recognize it? For example, watching someone cry over current events would be unrecognizable to a sociopathic person. They may even accuse the person of lying or putting on a performance. Could you also accept the possibility that even if such a person could recognize empathy, they still lack or block the capacity to feel the empathy, and therefore the only use the recognition has is in manipulation (use it to corroborate a point, or use it to spread an attack, or just fuck it, just use it for anything since you can't actually feel it). You don't have to actually do anything with empathy, you can literally just sit there and cry. If you think empathy has a use first and foremost, then sure, I can see why you think someone is using it in a performance. You see, some of us cry because it hurts us.
To get a better understanding, let's use something very analogous - Cringe. When we watch someone do something cringe, we feel it. The same is true for empathy you see, that's what it is. We feel someone else's pain. Psychologists say those that don't feel it are sociopaths.
"Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so successfully that they believe that it's real empathy"
Again, you have difficulty identifying real or not real empathy. This is not a problem for people that were raised without confusion. You can just say I'm from environments where I couldn't figure out if anyone cared about me or not (common). Is there a universe where you can accept this diagnosis or are you pure? We are all a constant work in progress.
The gene expression of apathy needs to be studied as well.
The nature of the changes aren’t well understood. It seems dangerous to assume that they are unhealthy, or somehow destructive when the opposite could just as easily be true. The children of those experiencing violence may be more robust in some ways rather than the opposite. It’s an interesting finding, and something to be understood better, but jumping to the conclusion that it’s a bad thing it’s just dismissive of the robustness of humanity in general.
If you're in a violent environment, that environment will be so antithetical to survivability, it's prudent for your genes to transcript you were in a violent environment for multiple generations.
I think you may want to re-read parent. They are saying that the reason you gave ( all of which were provided before ) barely restrained human kind from doing what it /was/is/will be doing.
You have to reach the children and rehabilitate them. This is the type of damage the children are growing up with (HBO documentary from 2004 which I highly recommend people watch, the journalist got fatally shot filming it):
> Based largely on the work of anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, this resulted in a shift towards what is known as "second-order cybernetics" which acknowledges the influence of the subjective observer in any study, essentially applying the principles of cybernetics to cybernetics – examining the examination.
This seems like the flip-side of the argument that eschewing violence makes you honorable only if you're actually capable of committing violence in the first place. Eschewing violence because you're incapable of committing it just means you're weak.
If Country A knows Country B can't defend itself, it's natural to assume at some point A may attack B. If the countries are relatively equally armed and skilled in the use of those arms, it would take a lot more for one country to attack the other.
War reparations gave us the Nazis, so they clearly don’t work. And compassion has given us everything we have seen thus far in history so we can conclude that too is ineffective.
> Dawes won the 1925 Nobel Prize, WWI reparations obligations were reduced
Then the US was lending them money and steel because it was so bad there, and then we learned they had been building tanks and bombs with our money instead of railroads and peaceful jobs.
And then the free money rug was pulled out from under them, and then the ethnic group wouldn't sell their paintings to help pay the debts of the war and subsequent central economic mismanagement.
And then they invaded various continents, overextended themselves when they weren't successfully managing their own country's economy, and the Allied powers eventually found the art (and gold) and dropped the bomb developed by various ethnic groups in the desert and that was that.
The US still occupies or inhabits Germany, which is Russia's neighbor.
Trump was $400 million in debt to Deutsche Bank AG (of Germany and Russia now) and had to underwrite said loan himself due to prior defaults. Nobody but Deutsche Bank would loan Trump (Trump Vodka, University,) money prior to 2016. Also Russian state banks like VEB, they forgot to mention.
Not sure that the guy who thinks "future generations shouldn't pay the cost for something they didn't do" is thinking his position when his very next thought is "we'll make the great-grandchildren of the warmongers pay cash to the great-grandchildren of the victorious warmongers".
This is basic Mediterranean basin wisdom, known for a very long time: “I am a jealous God punishing the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” One of the two mentions also says blessings are passed down 1000 generations, both of which seem pretty in line with modern evolutionary and epigenetic theory.
These seem to be rather different things though. I'm pretty sure this biblical passage is referring to a metaphysical concept, involving morality. Plus this article is a study about being on the receiving end of violence, not being the perpetrator of.
Exodus 20:5, “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations o those who hate Me,”
It's repeated in like dozen different places that you punish people for their parents sins to a few generations down.
On the other hand Ezekiel 18:20, “The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself.”
And then there's the original sin - which is punished for infinite number of generations.
Bible is using the oldest trick in the world - holding every position at the same time :) That way no matter what happens you can find a quote which supports it (also contradicts, but you don't share these).
The Bible is a small library of different books written by different people at different times. I don't think it's all that surprising that there are contradictions. In fact, I would say that pretty much every faith tradition with a long literary history suffers from this problem. I don't think that undermines that idea we can glean meaningful wisdom from sacred texts.
Flat contradiction undermines wisdom and empowers sophists. The most interesting aspect to sacred texts is the question of why some succeeded and some failed. What is the appeal? Within that context, the contradictions themselves serve a purpose, increasing the utility of the text particularly with those with a taste for power.
The problem is that sacred texts like the Bible (other examples might be the Pali Cannon in Buddhism or Vedas and Upanishads in Hinduism) do not contain "flat contradictions". If people hundreds of years apart write down conflicting ideas that later get complied together by another person/group who are using those texts for non-logical spiritual guidance, in what way is that a meaningful contradiction? Also, the idea that wisdom must be strictly rational is a modern, scientific standard that these texts fundamentally disagree with.
Using any of these passages as a prooftext for a particular position about the effects of God's wrath and drawing a singular conclusion from them is indeed incorrect, but it does not mean that there is a real contradiction. For example take these two passages.
Proverbs 26:4 (ESV)
"Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself."
Proverbs 26:5 (ESV)
"Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes."
They are "contradictory" but yet right next to each other. It can rather be taken that these are both true in certain contexts and must be held in tension against one another and applied with wisdom.
There are multiple instances of this in the old and new testaments.
I think the interesting thing here though is the notion of `am a jealous God`.
Note: Exodus 20:5 and Similar Passages: The concept of "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation" is often understood in the context of the collective nature of ancient Israelite society. It emphasizes the idea that the consequences of sin can affect subsequent generations, particularly in a communal and covenantal context. This does not necessarily mean direct punishment, but rather the natural repercussions and influence of one generation's behavior on the next.
So one interpretation is that: these people's descendants are not directly punished bust just less favorable by God given the jealous nature of God (i.e. the jealous nature to the degree that is expressed in Exodus 20:5 if we take Exodus 20:5 at face value as composed by Moses at the cultural-political time when he received the Commandments where God proclaimed that He is a jealous God)
On the other hand, regarding Ezekiel 18:20, it is a verse that is a part of a broader discussion in Ezekiel 18 that emphasizes individual responsibility when it was composed by the prophet Ezekiel ~6th century BCE, during the Babylonian exile. So once again, one good interpretation can be that due to the cultural-political background at that time, God's message to humanity (for the betterment of humanity) was in a tone where He emphasized less on His jealous aspect and more on the individualism of sins - which is interestingly very similar to the idea of karma formulated in Shakyamuni's Dharma, which was also around that time in human history.
> This does not necessarily mean direct punishment, but rather the natural repercussions and influence of one generation's behavior on the next.
This is a rationalization. If you try to interpret it honestly you can find dozen different places where god punish random people for sins of their relatives (for example "unoborn kids" in cities genocided by Old Testament Israelites either through regular war crimes or direct God's magical intervention).
And then there's the fragment that says that God will not punish a city if there's even one honest man there.
The only way to make it consistent is to ignore contradictions. And I'd say it would be easier to ignore the few ones that are against collective responsibilty (because there's far fewer of them).
> This is a rationalization. If you try to interpret it honestly
You are proceeding to not try to interpret it honestly; and thinking you are a genius for pointing out a supposed contradiction, because this hasn't been studied and researched for over 3,000 years at this point.
> for example "unoborn kids" in cities genocided by Old Testament Israelites either through regular war crimes or direct God's magical intervention
You seem to forget that Egypt, the land where they came from, was literally putting them to genocide first by ordering them to kill all male children; and any country they relocated to, would also have happily committed genocide against them if possible.
We also know from both the Bible and remaining physical evidence that the exterminated tribes were practicing horrific activities of their own. The Canaanites, for example, practiced child sacrifice to Molek, and (though not in the Bible, but from remaining historical evidence) even practiced ritual cannibalism. A command to exterminate them therefore should not be interpreted as intrinsically immoral or undeserved.
Yeah, no; you found something the church called a sin that you could not, or did not, want to overcome.
> Genociding Phillites' kids because some adult Egyptians were killing Jews is evil.
If evil is only an opinion of mind, who is to say? Russians call Ukrainians evil; Ukrainians call Russia evil; both kill the other. In your opinion, it was evil; but if you were forced between accepting a genocide against yourself on one hand, or fleeing and causing a genocide to survive, you may have different opinions.
While the article frames this phenomenon as self-evidently negative, I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a driver of island tameness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_tameness) in humans. To quote Theodore Roosevelt:
"The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful."
I don't know that this is super well-founded: It seems similar to the "Fremen Mirage" [1], and misses that in most cases the society that escapes war for longer will have time and energy to build infrastructure and accumulate resources that provide a decisive advantage in conflict and defense. Looking back at history it's rare that the "virile fighting" nation/group wins against a more "civilized" adversary that's better organized and resourced.
Of course, then we have groups like 'The United States of America', which has been at war basically every single hour in the last 100 years, and seems to be doing just right. At some point, you become powerful enough so that infrastructure does not help against you anymore (and may even become a liability: The conflicts the US does the worst in is wherever guerrilla warfare is waged, not where there are highways and telecommunication networks).
Respectfully. The idea that civilization makes men weak is bullshit. It was the agrarian centralized societies that waged war and destroyed the nomadic hunter gatherers. The more centralized, the more technologically advanced, the more successful a society is in war.
The exception to this rule is when a society destroyed itself through civil war. The western Roman empire destroyed itself during the Crisis of the Third Century when one regional commander after another declared himself emperor. Even during Augustus' time, the elite had a habit of cutting off their sons thumbs to avoid being conscripted into the legions.
The steppe nomads who conquered China (Mongols), Persia (Mongols), Byzantines (Turks), and India (Moghuls) were able to rule for centuries thereafter even after becoming "civilized". I would also argue this "civilizing" process was also a myth. The ruling elite kept their own traditions and cultures and lived separately from the people they ruled.
Civilization makes a society successful in war because of the destructive power of the weaponry available. But it absolutely seems reasonable that individual people could be less fit for physical combat as the above aspects of civilization (materialism, luxury, etc.)
This might have been true before technology but yet again the nerds ruin everything. Now that I think about it, this theory doesn’t really hold past tribalism. The Industrial Revolution is why England could conquer half the planet, not the brutish nature of the English.
Maybe in the future even the drones will have ennui and want to become dancers.
> The Industrial Revolution is why England could conquer half the planet, not the brutish nature of the English
I don't think that quote is about being brutish. The idea is that when times get easy, defence lowers (as why spend on defence?) and eventually someone else who is not living in luxury takes over, if they can reach you. I don't know if it's a valid theory, but I don't think it's about anyone's nature in particular.
Furthermore the Industrial Revolution stimulated the need for a trading empire to supply its materials. Nowadays we have global free trade (enforced by the US Navy - yet more technology) so trading empires are unnecessary.
Technology may be more predictive of conflict abroad than at home. If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not be able to bomb our way out of it.
> If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not be able to bomb our way out of it.
Why would you state this as if it were fact? It's not true.
Our own generals bombed the most important trade hub of the time, Atlanta, during the civil war.
Bombs are highly effective, and location matters little to their effectiveness or usefullness.
We dropped plenty of bombs in unreachable parts of Afghanistan. Were those effective? Yes, they were. Were those bombs as effective, in that region of uninhabitable tunnels and cliffs, as they would be in an urban setting? No, of course not.
Bombs are still the go-to attack and defense strategy. Bombs reduce the need for boots on the ground. Bombs reduce the enemy's ability to go to ground and hide.
If we faced a land invasion, in the USA, we would absolutely-certainly utilize modern weaponry, including bombs, to displace the enemy.
To say otherwise is to disregard history. To say otherwise is to place hope in pie-in-the-sky feelings and not the data we've accumulated over the last 200 years.
We dropped plenty of bombs in unreachable parts of Afghanistan. Were those effective? Yes, they were
In the short term, yes. In the long term the US eventually gave up and left. Likewise, the US bombed Vietnam heavily, eventually gave up and left. You can't hold territory with bombs.
To say otherwise is to disregard history. To say otherwise is to place hope in pie-in-the-sky feelings and not the data we've accumulated over the last 200 years.
Every military historian will tell you the same thing I just did, and cite examples going back thousands of years - military arson serves the same function as bombing.
We evidently hate the weak, egalitarianism, happiness, pacifism, jainists/unitarians universalists/Baháʼí, etc. Humanity's favorite emotion is Schadenfreude.
This sword of damocles shit that justifies the boot being on our face forever can fuck right off.
Honestly it's one of those ideas that make less sense the more you think about it. That quote and wikipedia link is drawing a connection between history as it was understood in the 19th century (e.g. unilineal evolutionism) and the behaviour of dodos.
I am a little confused by how there can be epigenetic genetic modifications. I'm not a biologist, but it seems to me that if it's epigenetic, it's not genetic and vice-versa.
The genes (code sequences stored in the DNA) are not modified.
Epigenetics is a recent discovery that the genes can be muted or not expressed).
The mechanism is that parts of the DNA strand often curl themselves up in a ball which prevents themselves from being replicated/expressed. Researchers are discovering there are many factors that influence this behavior.
"While our genes are not changed by life experiences, they can be tuned through a system known as epigenetics."
It is indeed not a modification of the genetic code. And the transmission of epigenetic state from one generation to the next is much less straightforward.
But there is another lasting effect of the attack, hidden deep in the genes of
Syrian families. The grandchildren of women who were pregnant during the siege —
grandchildren who never experienced such violence themselves — nonetheless bear
marks of it in their genomes. Passed down through their mothers, this genetic
imprint offers the first human evidence of a phenomenon previously documented
only in animals: The genetic transmission of stress across multiple generations.
The article clearly implies a modify of the genes. The genome is altered.
The actual study doesn’t make that claim, the article is presenting it incorrectly. They’re talking about a methylation on certain genes. Think of it as amplification or attenuation and of a signal. The signal is the same, just weaker or stronger.
I'm also very skeptic of the way these affirmations are made. Other studies I've read boil down to epigenetic changes caused by stress, not actual DNA rewriting, otherwise it wouldn't go back to normal ever. In other words, these epigenetic changes are directly proportional to how stressful the environment remains.
The article mentions Hama, where a massacre occurred, and 40 years later the inhabitants still show epigenetic changes caused by stress. Surely the environment still being stressful is more to blame than their ancestor's genetic memory.
There's great danger of misinterpreting this kind of research to bolster ideological agendas. I've seen this misused as "my grandpa was a victim of the holocaust, so I, born into and living a comfortable and peaceful life, am also a holocaust victim and deserve respect".
The press release writer was a bit shit at understanding basic scientific jargon. The research only finds epigenetic markers. There are no genetic changes. There are detectable changes to gene expression, and that's it.
I'm not a biologist either, but from my reading there are many cellular elements that influence genetic expression that are not encoded in DNA. And those elements can mutate as a result of the individual's experience during their lifetime. Some of them have independent genetic lines. DNA = behavior is reductive.
To a very minor degree. If DNA is a compiled binary, epigenetics is like the settings database. It can toggle and alter behaivor and it has some degree of persistence, but ultimately it can only change things in ways allowed by the binary.
you can put the researchers names into a search engine (ask an academic librarian if you need help). I'm not sure if it's in the scope of the press release to link directly to primary sources.
To give you a better understanding of how this works, if my university didn’t include a link to my research in the press release about my publication, I’d contact them to issue a correction. That’s how fundamental it is to link to the research article.
That's a misunderstanding. This is not a "blog"; this is a press release from a university on its newsfeed. Linking to their own researcher's work is not a matter of being "rigorous" and is unrelated (and not at all similar) to academic citations.
I'm not sure why they are calling out a specific conflict. People don't have objective violence barometers. Every act of new worst violence you ever experience is the worst ever until something worse happens.
Not exactly the "first human evidence of a phenomenon". There was an article published in 2013 about the 1836 potato famine. Descendants of those who experienced the famine first hand, expressed altered genome due to the stress.
There isn’t a single mother human study showing methylation persisting on the same genes across 3 generations. It’s only been demonstrated in mice once prior and with some controversy.
> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
Alas, a new target for lasting, inter-generational psychological assault.
There are some uncomfortable truths coming down the science pipe.
It will turn out that we're not all the same, at all. And that a ton of the behavioral traits we see everyday are indeed genetic. Yes, I mean crime stats.
The pushback will be immense, as it goes after foundational beliefs of modern society, deep blasphemy - but we have to trust the science.
I'm happy to hear that you agree that we must fearlessly follow the science no matter where it leads us.
Unfortunately in this case, this news item deals with epigenetics that affects gene expression, not changes in actual genes. The same thing would happen to humans of every race and ethnicity, given the same conditions.
It might be uncomfortable to confront things you'd rather take for granted, but as long as you're willing to accept the truth when facts don't align with your feelings then have no worries. You're on the right path.
The real "uncomfortable truth" that the GP blithely glosses is the effect of multi-generational poverty. If a society has determined that some people are entirely expendable, then the misery of the latter over generations is easily dismissed as "biological destiny".
I think the main problem is that something like "science proves generational trauma is real" is a nice headline, so people p-hack it into existence. "Science proves that generational trauma is not real" is just a null hypothesis being confirmed - not a publishable result and nobody cares, so you'll never hear about it. So be very skeptical of nice headlines, especially in university press releases!
I saw a video about a study on Japanese villagers nearby seismic fault or volcanos. And IIRC the villagers facing the dangers directly had different tempers probably driven by the constant risks and traumas from past catastrophes, while the villagers further away and shielded by hills, were calmer.
I have Aphantasia. I always wondered whether the physical and emotional violence my mother experienced increased the probability for it. I guess I'll never know, but it's interesting to see that epigenetics seems to be in play.
So why won't people listen to me that compassion for all human beings is the only excellent choice for us, both personally and in our cultures/societies/groups?
The side that takes pleasure in the misery of others does so because the negative effects can be -- just as this title states -- deleterious for generations.
We must evolve ourselves to, instead, sow the seeds of compassionate concern for all human beings to rid ourselves of the damaging effects of abuse of every kind, between any two people or groups of people.
Yes, accomplishing any progress in that direction is fundamentally difficult because it goes against our animal physiology and negative potential, not to mention the even more generations of institutional pack mentality that so permeates our cultures' seeking of power.
We could choose peace and compassion, if we chose to, but such a bold endeavor takes utter commitment and real work, for each and every one of us.
Compassion is always the solution to ALL our problems, because the lack of compassion is ALWAYS the fundamental cause of EACH and EVERY one.
It is both that simple, and that difficult, but it is also rewarding beyond normal comprension, for it is the most real kind of magic in this multiverse.
Research area that would be extremely interesting: whether and how epigenetic changes of this type correlated with social-political behavior and values.
Generational trauma is really hard to resolve. A therapist once told me "family systems don't like change." The really old family dynamics have a way of being passed down and reinforced. We settle into roles that perpetuate them.
Interesting that there is not just social pressure but also genetic pressure that may be perpetuating the trauma.
My grandfather drove a tank through Europe for the allies during WW2 and I know that is still impacting me and my kids. He self medicated his presumed PTSD with alcohol and died young before I was born. That impacted my father and the way he related to me. And I am sure it impacts how I relate to my kids too. I don't drink anymore because that history scares me. The rise in fascist and nationalist ideologies scares me too.
If we forget history we are doomed to repeat it. Both at an individual and societal level.
A study of people who were adopted as babies could be interesting, depending on circumstances the stress on the birth mother could be reflected in the child but the dynamics of the birth family after birth would no longer be in play. I am specifically thinking of Ireland where there are a significant number of people in their 40s up that were the result of pretty much forced adoption due to the societal stigma of getting pregnant out of wedlock which would have been very stressful as the mothers were sent to mother and baby homes once they began to show.
My grandfather also drank himself to death for similar reasons. What scares me is that as a society we forget too quickly the true cost and suffering caused by war.
I'm very interested in this branch of same-generation evolution, as this is one of the core components excluded from Natural Selection theory
I'm very skeptical about it, but they do suggest they have a control group to observe in this study. Despite not being able to pinpoint an actual effect of these genetic markets.
"Passed down through their mothers, this genetic imprint offers the first human evidence of a phenomenon previously documented only in animals: The genetic transmission of stress across multiple generations."
I wish reporters were required to research their claims.
Apart from epigenetics, which influences offspring but confers no permanent genetic change, there is no inheritance of acquired traits. On this topic, for political reasons Joseph Stalin promoted Trofim Lysenko's incorrect views in this topic, which set Soviet genetics back decades. More here: "The destructive role of Trofim Lysenko in Russian Science" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6777473/)
Articles like this should at least explain how and why their claims differ from established genetic principles.
Lots of people here stating that this is an epigenetic change rather than a change in the genetic sequence, which I think is missing the point somewhat.
Epigenetic changes are an important part of your genetic make-up. To give you an example, the only reason that your skin cells remain your skin cells when they divide, and your liver cells remain your liver cells when they divide, is due to the epigenetic make up. Their DNA is the same, but the cells are very different, and epigenetics pass that information along when the code is copied.
In the same way, these stress-related epigenetic changes are being copied down and inherited by the generation two under.
This is already known, I think it was first seen in the Swedish famine cohort. At that time it was not clear it was due to epigenetics, but there was a clear signal in the health of those descendants [1], published here in 2002.
> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
This sounds like it was custom written perfectly to support censorshit. The usual "oh no... hurt feelings" stuff
Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is mostly bogus. This research is usually invoked as an alternative to the much more straight-forward, easily verifiable influences of normie genetics. Since these are not deemed socially desirable, this epigenetic pseudoscience gets millions in funding.
"There's new evidence that historical trauma is passed down through changes to the genome!"
"Genome or epigenome?"
"...epigenome."
I feel like I read of a similar study every few years, the first I can recall was 'Transgenerational response to nutrition, early life circumstances and longevity'[1], and it is always needlessly disappointing to thumb through past the headline and read that, inevitably, the media has decided to report this as a change to the genome when the actual research suggests otherwise.
Epigenetic changes are interesting in their own right! But they don't change human genes, at most they change gene expression.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/5201832
I work as an editor sometimes. I've worked in technical writing, though not specifically science journalism.
My guess for why this keeps happening, is that it's a two-step process, fueled by a failure of communication:
1. The science writer themselves does understand epigenetics — but doesn't think it's important to the point the article is making for the reader to understand epigenetics. The writer wants to remove the requirement/assumption of "understanding epigenetics" from their writing, while still being technically correct in everything they say. So they choose to gloss an epigenetic change as "causing changes to the DNA." (Which it certainly does! Either chemically — to the DNA molecules themselves, through methylation; or structurally/topologically — through modifications to the histones around which the DNA is wrapped.)
2. The science writer's not-so-scientific editor comes along, doing a stylistic editing pass; sees the word "DNA"; and says "hey, that's jargon, and we're aiming for accessibility here — we need to replace this." And they (incorrectly) decide that a valid 1:1 replacement for "DNA" is "genes" or "genome."
This invalidating change could be caught... if the publication had a formal workflow step / requirement for the editor to perform a back-check with the original writer after copyediting + stylistic editing, to ensure that validity has not been compromised. I believe that big-name science journals and science magazines do tend to have these back-check steps. But smaller publications — like the PR departments of universities — don't.
I can't speak for every institution, but our PR department does as many back and forth passes as it takes for the scientists who did the work to sign off that any edits made still preserve scientific accuracy.
> The science writer themselves does understand epigenetics — but doesn't think it's important to the point the article is making for the reader to understand epigenetics
That's not a valid defense, otherwise they could write with a straight face that sun exposure causes genetic changes that make you darker, and how your descendants will inherit those changes too. It is dishonest writing, bordering on disinformation. Said article would attract clicks and attention like a cursed magnet, though.
To me the parent reads more as explanation than defense, and that's valuable.
Human systems are imperfect and messy. Understanding how they break down helps us make them better.
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If the editor is only editing for style and readability while adding factual mistakes along the way, they could be entirely replaced with ChatGPT in a tight loop with the science writer. Write article -> make style changes -> writer reviews again for correctness.
It’s inexcusable that the quality of science communication is so low.
These studies are at the interface of genetics, sociology, and political action. They are underwhelming in all three domains. The genetics are based in puny sample sizes, and this has been true going back to the Yehuda study (2015, PMID: 26410355) and remains true of this broader followup (42 controls and only 18 in the germline exposure group). I do not understand designing experiments like this and taking the results seriously, unless we move on to sociology and political action; in which case the motivation is clear:
“…may encourage policymakers and humanitarian agencies to provide targeted resources to vulnerable populations…”
Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to decide who gets “healthcare access, special lodging, sanitation, and nutrition”? No, never.
One could get a lot further a lot faster doing well controlled experiments in animal models. But even here the sociological context intrudes. Mike Meaney’s original work in the early 2000s is still open to questions.
> Hard to argue with that, but do we now use a handful of epigenetic markers generated using a cheek swab sample to decide who gets “healthcare access, special lodging, sanitation, and nutrition”? No, never.
I don't think the activism/sociological angle here was supposed to be interpreted as being about targeted reconciliation toward existing victims of violence / their descendants. Even if those people are potentially "living life on hard mode" as a result of previous violence. (After all, finding and helping those people would require complex infrastructure and lots of money.)
Rather, I think the thrust of the implicit activist argument would be closer to:
1. Experiencing violence turns out to be even worse for you than we thought — and in non-recoverable ways! (You can't therapy your way out of epigenetic changes.)
2. And so more should be done to prevent/ameliorate violence and its impact on people, before it can cause durable epigenetic changes;
3. ...and some "low-hanging fruit" in reducing this impact for minimal cost, would be to supply more resources for escaping/coping with violence (e.g. shelters; crisis lines; social workers; restraining orders that actually work) specifically to groups who are demographically most likely to become victims of violence.
4. And perhaps we can even use this correlation we've found to also measure the effectiveness of interventions like these — sampling the trends in epigenomic changes in these vulnerable populations over time (i.e. a repeated cross-sectional study), to know if marginal increases in certain types of resources actually have measurable impacts on "cushioning" these populations from violence, enough to prevent these epigenetic changes.
These arguments sometimes reach juries, who are asked to award damages based on "physical harms," in a separate category from "mental anguish."
The argument that "brains are rewired" or "generations of genetics are harmed" is popular in 'trauma informed' arguments for compensation or government help.
A lot of sociology research is activist in nature and not rigorous. Is the study similar?
Alas, even the rodent studies are not rigorous.
Activist "science" is how you turn "hard to argue with" cases into "there's plenty to argue with" ones.
> But they don't change human genes, at most they change gene expression.
It's not clear in this case what the difference is between gene, gene expression, and gene encoding. What does gene mean if it does not imply either encoding or expression? If this is a disagreement about the semantics of encoding, surely it'd be easiest to express this in terms of encoding. If this is about gene expression, surely it'd be easiest to express this in terms of expression. "gene" largely has no meaning outside of encoding/expression.
It seems clear to me the article is indicating a distinction of encoding. I'm not sure where the ambiguity is.
First, a point of clarification: coding and encoding are two different things. "Encoding" is a CS term that doesn't come up much in biology. (You could say that DNA is an encoding of a base-4 number sequence.) "Coding" is a bioinformatics term — DNA base-pairs code for particular RNA sequences; and then, only if they're in a coding region. (Analogy: flux patterns on a floppy disk code for particular bytes, but only if they're in a sector.)
Second: what are genes? A "gene" is an abstraction.
Let's first define a "genome". A genome is the complete dump of raw data of "what the DNA base-pair sequence string says" — before any coding or expression occurs. Whenever we sequence DNA, it's [parts of] this raw base-pair string that we get back — not the codons, not the expressed RNA sequences. And this is why we care — sequencing is the tool we have, so it's the lens by which we look at DNA. And that lens shows us the raw data.
When we talk about "genes" (or "SNPs" / other bioinformatics terms), we're basically talking about the ways in which that raw data we can extract through sequencing, relates to observed phenotypic changes. A "gene" is a particular part of a "genome" (DNA base-pair sequence) that can be uniquely identified as being the cause of interesting phenotypic consequences when changes are made to it. (Which in turn is how we figure out what genes are "responsible for" doing what.)
Note how these concepts, "genome" and "gene", both completely ignore epigenetics / gene expression. That's because these terms were invented before epigenetics was invented, and these terms are part of a model that uses a lens (DNA sequencing) that itself ignores epigenetics. Gene sequencing shows you the world of DNA as if epigenetics didn't exist.
Now let's talk about DNA.
If you think that epigenetics is about changing how DNA encodes information, then you might be thinking of "DNA" via the lie-to-children model, of it just being a long sequence of nucleotides.
But consider: why do chromosomes look the way they do — little X shapes? A long string of base pairs, on its own, has no reason to assemble into that macroscopic shape.
This is because "DNA" — which is really a shorthand for "the DNA complex" (i.e. a complex of multiple weakly-bound molecules that together form the chromatin of a chromosome) — is not just nucleotide base-pairs. The nucleotide base-pairs form one molecule (the deoxyribonucleic acid string itself); but then you've got other stuff. You've got histones — little tape-spools the DNA string is wrapped onto. You've got methyl groups — little markers hanging off particular places on the DNA string. You've got other stuff I don't personally understand/know about.
When lay-people talk about "DNA", they're really referring to the whole complex of molecules that makes up each one of your chromosomes.
"Genes" are just the bioinformatic data representation of the deoxyribonucleic-acid-base-pair-string part of that complex of molecules.
But gene coding, and gene expression, are both a result of what the other molecules in that complex are doing.
(Think about it: if gene coding + expression were encoded in-band by the DNA itself, then that information would be appear in DNA sequencing — and so we'd be unable to differentiate that information from changes to the DNA itself — and so we wouldn't even have a concept of "epigenetics", because it would all just look like "genetics"!)
Here's a picture: https://www.genome.gov/sites/default/files/media/images/2022...
Histones — those little tape spools — attract or repel each-other due to chemical modifications to the histones themselves. Two histones that "snap together", prevent the region of DNA "tape" between them from being physically accessed by the RNA polymerase enzymes that "read the tape" to produce RNA.
Methylation markers hang off of the initial "landing sites" for RNA polymerase enzymes (CpG dinucleotides — think "floppy-disk sector header"), and repel them.
When you sequence DNA, you ignore these transcription-silencing signals. You can picture DNA sequencing as "unrolling" the deoxyribonucleic acid off of its histone carriers, rendering them irrelevant; and then using molecular tools to read the sequence — tools that, unlike RNA polymerase, are not repelled by methyl-groups.
If you use more-modern techniques to capture this additional information about where these silenced regions are, and by what mechanism they've been silenced, then you get what we call an "epigenome" — which isn't a post-translated version of DNA, but rather sort of a "metadata track" that runs parallel to the DNA "data track."
(And you can, in theory, combine the two to calculate an "expressed genome." I don't think we've ever done that yet — partly because "whole-epigenome sequencing" doesn't yet exist in the way that "whole-genome sequencing" does; and partly because epigenetic metadata is probabilistic — with some modifications decreasing the probability of a region coding for something, rather than turning it off altogether — and so current approaches, that derive the epigenome "by reaction", would observe something like "weak bits" on a floppy disk — regions that read differently each time, requiring many passes to calculate a "flux strength" for each region and to find each silenced region's true borders.)
> "Encoding" is a CS term that doesn't come up much in biology
I am a biochemist. The term is absolutely used all the time, in the CS sense, in biology.
This is the sort of long-form comment that I'd write and love to read, signed in just to upvote it, well-put!
Nit: chromosomes mostly don't look like little X-shapes except during cell division, which was historically a useful time to image them (I think because the dye couldn't get through the cell-nucleus wall but during cell division it has dissolved?). But then you are seeing _two_ chromosomes that happen to be bound at a centromere before that centromere gets torn into two by the cytoskeleton dividing the cell in half.
I appreciate the effort you've put in above, but I think you're defining both gene and genome from too narrowly. Both terms predate our understanding of the structural mechanisms of heredity.
A gene is a unit of heredity.
The genome is the sum total of all genetic information in an organism.
Both are extremely loose terms. Individual sub-fields of biology/biochemistry may use more specific variations in specific contexts, but the definitions above cover all of those meanings.
The terms were essentially redefined more strictly as our understanding of genetics grew more refined.
(I.e. per my sibling post, there were jargon terms with these names that had one particular definition under an early, black-box mental model of heritability that is no longer used/favored; and there are new replacement jargon terms with the same names, that have a different definition under the more-modern mental model of germline heritability.)
After all, there are entirely non-genetic mechanisms of heredity. You inherit some of your mother's immune histochemistry through developmental exposure, and more through consuming breastmilk. Yet there is nothing that "codes" for this histochemistry; it's just a stateful process (mother's immune system) interacting with another stateful process (foetal immune system) — working almost more like a "colonization" of commensal bacteria than like gene transfer.
In terms of "heritable traits" — "nature vs nurture" — such effects appear squarely on the "nature" side. But they're not germline heritable. Implant the fertilized egg into a surrogate mother, and you get different histochemistry. Have a wetnurse feed the baby, and you get different histochemistry.
If these things are "genetics" — if the information carried by the state of immune cells in response to observing natal antigens is "genes" — then the term "genetics" has no useful meaning / is useless to talk about the thing we want to talk about when we talk about genetics. Where "what we talk about when we talk about genetics", is how an organism's breeding/germline ancestry, predicts phenotypic outcomes.
And if you agree that that is the thing we want to talk about — then epigenetic information isn't "genes" (under the germline-heritability model) either. Your epigenetics is hereditary, but only in the same sense that your immunohistochemistry is hereditary — being passed via exposure in a natal environment, rather than being "written into" the fertilized egg.
(Also — at least AFAIK — we don't even consider our nuclear mitochondrial DNA to be a part of our genomes. Even though it is passed through the germline, and is intensely important in many congenital metabolic dysfunctions. Because our mitochondria are not technically "us" — we might call them organelles, but they're still more like commensal prokaryotes in how cells treat them: dividing on a separate timeline from our cells; not assortatively assigned to daughter cells by spindle fibers during mitosis; not observed + checkpointed to ensure sufficient numbers exist for daughter cells before telophase; etc.)
I learned a huge amount from this post, wish I could upvote it again, thanks for taking the time to write it all out!
> A "gene" is a particular part of a "genome" (DNA base-pair sequence)
See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans communicate. Regardless of if you're referring to "coding" or "encoding" (I'm not sure of the semantic difference between these two terms, frankly, nor an understanding why this distinction is worth presenting without remediation) a gene is still a heritable trait, not a specific span of a specific encoding of a specific molecule. A gene is, colloquially, a heritable trait that implies no specifics about how it's coded/encoded into whatever substrate you choose. You're referring to a far more specific term most people won't recognize as meaningful, and you can either explicitly describe what you're discussing or accept that people will misunderstand you.
I see you're trying to advocate for specific terminology to agree on, but it's far more effective to meet people where they already are rather than trying to push jargon onto others.
If I'm wrong, that people specifically refer to subsets of a DNA encoding by referring to "gene", please educate me.
You are not wrong but even among biologists and geneticists there are differences of opinion and differences of context. If a mouse geneticist says they knocked out gene X they usually mean that they inactivated the production of mRNA from a specific gene “model”. If you were talking to Richard Dawkins he would have a much more expansive definition of a “gene” that would include a much longer sequence of DNA (many protein-coding genes) that remains in a particular state long enough to be selected for (or not) or to drift to fixation or extinction.
It is not quite right to say: “a gene is … a heritable trait.” This definition equates gene with trait. Yes that is how Mendel thought about his results since he could only see and quantify traits. But there are still a depressingly large number of protein-coding genes without linkage to traits.
We are not generally mouse geneticists, though. We are assumably a proxy for the general public.
> It is not quite right to say: “a gene is … a heritable trait.”
This is a reality of communication you need to deal with: that's absolutely how people will interpret the term "gene".
> Yes that is how Mendel thought about his results since he could only see and quantify traits. But there are still a depressingly large number of protein-coding genes without linkage to traits.
From my perspective, from my exceedingly humble opinion, "heritable trait linked by reproduction and not culture" is absolutely how the public at large understands the term "gene". The fact that scientists cannot successfully link protein-coding to linguistically-bound traits is an issue that scientists will have to work around when communicating about the specifics of heritability, genetic determinism, and discretization of individuals. "Gene" is simply not a term you can reliably link to DNA in the popular consciousness and is likely not worth the effort or money to redefine.
> See, this is a non-starter. Sure it's coherent, but you've simply failed on step one to identify how humans communicate.
No. There are two distinct ways in which humans communicate.
• Humans create and use words, whose usage stretches and spreads and grows and can only be defined descriptively.
• Humans (doing professional/technical/scientific work) also define-into-existence jargon terms — the meaning of which is set in stone at the moment of creation.
Jargon terms are verbal handles we use to grasp parts of particular, well-defined mental models — models that are taught and learned as coherent systems of such terms; models that exist to enable their users to think rigorously, and collaborate without corruption of meaning/loss of rigor, to "get things done" in those professional/technical/academic contexts.
Jargon terms, therefore, can always be said — definitively, objectively(!) — to have been employed correctly or incorrectly in any given text, per the mental model in which the jargon term is defined.
Sometimes, professionals/technical people/scientists are dumb and silly, and attempt to invent a jargon term made of words, where those words, put together in that order, have such an obvious, novel, and useful lay usage, that it is inevitable that anyone who hears the term will already think they know what it means, before ever being formally taught what it means.
"Begs the question" is an example of this — there is something so uniquely useful about the lay meaning of that phrase (essentially "a situation that demands that an unstated question be asked"), that whoever named (or more likely, translated from Latin into English) that logical fallacy, made a mistake by choosing to use those words to name it.
But that situation is rare.
Most of the time, professionals/technical people/scientists make up a word all on their own, to be jargon, entirely for their own use. (Often they use Latin for this, as an intentional way to dodge the aforementioned problem of the word "seeming like it has an intuitive meaning" in any living language. But they don't have to. They can also just make up a nonsense word, perhaps one inspired by a Latin prefix or something — a word like "gene.")
And then, through a pipeline of scientific discoveries, to science journalism, to pop-science, to regular people just talking about how their aunt has asthma due to "that bad gene she got from her father" — somewhere along the line, someone screws up in how they're using the jargon term; and that screwed-up understanding proliferates.
But jargon terms — at least the ones that are part of mental models anyone still employs any more — must still be used to do work. And they cannot function to do that work, if people can't use them with the implicit understanding that they are communicating an exact, precise, well-defined idea. Such words are not merely words; they are professional tools. The professionals that use these tools, cannot allow them to be corrupted, to have their meanings diffuse.
And so, at least the professionals themselves, will always be taught that any jargon term they learn has one specific meaning — that it acts as a handle for a particular concept in a particular mental model.
And those professionals will insist on this strictness when working with any technical writer or editor.
And this strictness diffuses from there, into any editorial context where editors consider themselves to be professionals, working for a publication that expects professionalism — whether that publication is technical or non-technical.
In professional editing, is always expected that if any term (word or phrase) is used which is known to be a (unique, non-colliding) jargon term rooted in some technical/academic mental model, then that term should only be permitted if it is being used with its original jargon meaning. Any other handling of such a term is considered a usage error, effectively a typo.
(For non-unique/colliding jargon terms where lay usage exceeds jargon usage, the lay-usage is given represented by plain printing, while the jargon usage is represented by italic printing. This only ever comes up with phrases — "begging the question" again — because even the most ivory-tower academics know that overloading the meanings of single extant lay words is a stupid way to invent jargon.)
This is a long spiel to justify refusing trying to communicate in an effective manner. I understand the concept of professionals recognizing the quality standards others put forward, but at some point you've got to care if you even come of as sensical to non-professionals if you want to communicate to them. This necessarily implies a reaction to something not being "but they misused the word gene!!!".
It doesn't matter when lay people misuse professional jargon. It matters when professionals speaking to lay people misuse professional jargon. (As was what was being pointed out as wrong about the OP article — it is professional writing, from the PR department of a university!)
In other words, it's about "those who know" being a role model for correct usage by "those who don't know."
(Why bother? Because then people are more likely to come into the profession with an understanding of the concept that's at least compatible with teaching them the model; rather than having an understanding of the model so debased that they need to actively unlearn it before they can learn the correct model.)
> It matters when professionals speaking to lay people misuse professional jargon.
Who is the grand arbiter of whether or not use this use is "misuses" or, perahs "correct", whatever that means—the professionals, or the lay people?
> What does gene mean if it does not imply either encoding or expression?
The less mutable part. The strongly heritable stuff. Genes are part of your body, as is your brain, that doesn’t mean your every thought is equivalent to DNA.
Having said that, there's some very recent research to suggest that memories / neuronal weights are actually encoded directly in neuronal DNA.
(this does not mean that this DNA is directly heritable, since it does not necessarily end up in the gametes, but it is still interesting that, yes, in fact, it involves DNA change)
So, you're referring to encoding via DNA? Why not just say that explicitly rather than refer to some occluded understanding of the word "gene"?
This also seems to be a semantic distinction largely irrelevant to understanding the article as presented.
Yeah, people are holding on to the rigid, simplistic, outdated notion that DNA is the "genetic code" that defines everything.
I think neural nets show that, realistically, evolution requires backpropagation (epigenetics).
I don't think it requires it but it would certainly be an edge with "backpropagation"?
DNA methylation is epigenetic, and that's a direct chemical alteration of DNA. The title isn't wrong, and your example sentence isn't wrong either.
Describing a change to DNA methylation "alters" a gene is technically correct in the sense that it is an change to the molecular structure of the DNA that makes up the gene, but is indeed misleading, because without further clarification a majority of people would assume it refers to a change in the gene sequence.
But since many of them misunderstand the role of gene sequences, that may be less meaningful than you imply.
Should it not be "affects" or "influences"?
DNA methylation means adding one or more methyl groups to the DNA, so technically it is an alteration. But most people would assume that altering a gene specifically means changing the "letters" of the gene sequence that encode the protein, and that's not what DNA methylation does.
Oh, yeah, I suppose I read "influences behavior" a bit too much.
I read about DNA methylation (well, epigenetics in general) in one book for behavioral epigenetics.
I'm a complete layman here, but what is the difference exactly?
Personally, I think of DNA as being like the Linux kernel codebase. There's a lot of raw "code" there — but not all of it ends up in every running kernel!
DNA methyl-groups, acetylated histones, etc — these are the config file generated by running `menuconfig`. They determine:
1. which components of the kernel the "compiler toolchain" (RNA polymerase) will actually "compile" (transcribe) into kernel-module objects (RNA sequences, proteins) — in turn determining which "features" (developmental or metabolic processes) each of the components (cell/tissue types) of the resulting system (organism) will have; and
2. which #IFDEFs (coding regions) within those modules will actually be macro-enabled (expressed) during compile-time (transcription) — in turn influencing / varying / tuning the strategies and logic (frequency of production / likelihood of expression, final shape / folding / binding affinities of proteins) used by any given component (cell/tissue type) to perform a given "feature" (developmental or metabolic process).
(And just a tweak to steer this intuition pump — your body doesn't have one kernel, compiled once at conception; rather, your body is more like a distributed system composed of machines running Gentoo — every cell has its own kernel, and each cell is "tweaking" and "recompiling" its kernel regularly. When cells undergo mitosis, both daughter cells inherit these tweaks — that's like setting up a new one of these machines by mirroring the hard drive from an existing machine, carrying over not just the kernel but also the at-snapshot version of the `menuconfig` configuration file.)
The gene itself determines the shape and character of a protein; Gene expression refers to the quantity of a protein produced. Changes to the genome are long lasting and somewhat rare inside a living person, while changes to the epigenome happen fairly regularly.
A good way to think of this is cell differentiation. Every cell in your body, except eggs and sperm, contains a copy of your entire genome but what differentiates a nerve cell from a liver cell from a skin cell is gene expression. All it takes is some changes to the epigenome of a stem cell during mitosis for one the resulting cells to become a new, differentiated cell.
Imagine you have the text of a book in a word processor. You can change the text by typing new words or deleting ones that are there. You can also change the font, size, alignment, etc. The latter category of changes does not alter the words in the text, but it can affect how that text is interpreted, which parts of the text a reader focuses on, etc. The difference between a genetic alteration and an epigenetic alteration is conceptually similar. Genetics is changing the "text" of the genome while epigenetics is changing aspects of the genome that affect how that "text" is interpreted and used.
DNA is source code, and there is a bunch of RNA processes that read it and do stuff to make you live. Parts of DNA can be turned on and off, that’s called expression. Epigenetics is the study of how genes are expressed. Gene expression can change without the genome itself changing depending on external conditions, which is a key part of adaptability.
One is heritable, the other mostly not.
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> they don't change human genes, at most they change gene expression.
This is an extremely pedantic distinction, especially since the article as a whole is pretty clear.
In nearly all cases, what matters is whether we're talking about information that is encoded and passed down. That's the case here, even if the encoding and persistance characteristics are different.
It's a crucial difference. Encoding and persistence in your genome means permanent changes, not for a few generations, PERMANENT. Epigenetic encoding and persistence is temporary, even if it expresses for more than one generation.
Crucial difference, one is a mutation, the other an environmental adaptation.
Essentially yes, and the article makes pretty clear that the changes last for generations.
It's in the title and it's clear throughout the text of the article.
So that's a totally moot point.
If this headline’s claim were true, why would it apply just to violence and not all experiences? Wouldn’t it imply that all kinds of activities alter genes? For example if you play sports, you might get one type of change and if you were a lawyer, you might get another kind of change and so on.
You should read the actual article, which provides necessary context and nuance, and not just the headline. The article is specifically discussing the effect of stressors caused by trauma (violence) on the transmission of genes from mother to child. The effect discussed does not generalize to all experiences.
Gene and geneome are expansive terms. The genome refers to the sum total of all genetic material in an organism. Epigenenetic markers such as methylations are part of the genetic material, and are therefore part of the genome.
You seem to be disappointed in the headline because you're expecting narrower definitions.
Although the article text doesn't claim genomic changes, the untitled graphic mentions "germline" in the "1980 Group" column. Not certain how to interpret that. I don't see the graphic in any publication of Mulligan, Panter and Dajani altogether.
> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
This seems like a pretty charitable read on policymakers. We inflict violence all the time that has multigenerational downstream effects without a genetic component and we don’t really care about the human cost, why would adding a genetic component change anything?
I'll quote Michael Douglas from Traffic, "If there is a war on drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don’t know how you wage war on your own family". His daughter was knee deep in heroin addiction as he was tasked to criminalize everyone. By the end of the movie he was changed imo.
We have no way of giving such an experience to those in power. The best we can do going forward is pick more well rounded people, and no, that doesn't mean great schools and great wealth. You must be experienced in life.
That was a good film. I always remembered del Toro’s recommendation about bulling more lighted fields for kids. Chinese society could learn a lot about how gaming is actually not that addictive when you look deeper into the problem.
Getting off the rails here but I never get to talk about this movie!
When first watching that movie, I really didn't like it right until the last scene, with Michael Douglas and his daughter in rehab, with the line "My name is Robert. And my wife, Barbara and I are here to support our daughter Caroline. And we're here to listen."
It was such a simple yet clever way to end the movie and highlight a central theme in the movie, which is that the way to solve our problems isn't to demonize the people that caused them, but instead to listen to them.
It was weird, because it sort of retroactively made me really like the rest of the movie.
I feel like I'm willing to put up with a lot of the more slow-paced stuff if I know it's going somewhere. If I know that this is building up to an interesting theme, then I don't get bored.
It's now become one of my favorite films.
War on drugs != War on drug users.
Shouldn't it be War on dug dealers?
It’s shouldn’t be a war at all. That framing is unhelpful to solving the actual policy and societal problems.
I agree, and I think the militarization of the police has been a net negative on the US. It should be police action. East Asian countries have very low drug use rates because they deal with drug use appropriately. Meanwhile in San Francisco, a comparably far richer place, drug use is tolerated and the problem proliferates.
And you don’t need armored vehicles and SWAT teams to get to a better place.
It can be some legal actions, for sure? If it's illegal polices should move forward to clean them up?
No, patrolling your streets like you would a warzone is bad for everyone. It’s not a war. Any allusion to it being a war is bad. It is policing.
I don't understand why people prefer drug dealers than polices. But every one gets his/her mind.
You are changing the framing to excuse drug dealers. Most of the people with harsh lives don’t become criminals.
The point of the "war" framing is to manufacture consent for the chronic inflammation that is patriarchal domination via semi-martial law.
> the chronic inflammation that is patriarchal domination via semi-martial law
What does this mean?
Said the guy who is safely sitting 4,000 kms. away from where the reality of his "opinions" takes place.
If you have a point to make, it would help if you made it.
I can paraphrase for your better understanding.
You do not know the context and ignore many of the particular causes and events that led to this situation. Your assessment of the situation is very shallow, hence why you carelessly state an "opinion" that has nothing to stand on, one simple way to prove that is that in reality there is a war happening.
If you have trouble with anything there let me know and I'll gladly find a better way to explain it.
I have trouble with it. You have no idea where the other person is located (beyond the USA) and offer nothing to support your alternative point of view besides attacks on the other poster. Since you say there is a war happening and imply that you do know the context, perhaps you should share that information.
There is a war happening because we have waged it. We attacked the symptom with military gusto and ignored the problems that caused it. We made domestic policies that legislated morality and poured billions into the coffers of the cartels. We countered with billions spent in the military industrial complex and by militarizing the police. So yes, there is a war happening. Because that is how we framed it.
Billions of dollars were going to flow into the coffers of the cartels either way; the people want drugs, the cartels are willing to use violence in order to organize who gets to distribute and at what prices they sell. There's no such thing as a peaceful hard-drug manufacturing operation.
> Billions of dollars were going to flow into the coffers of the cartels either way
There is no evidence for that and prohibition in the US provides a strong counter argument.
> There's no such thing as a peaceful hard-drug manufacturing operation.
Because it has never been tried in the modern era.
There's no such thing as a peaceful hard-drug manufacturing operation.
You have to research Gacha games.
That hasn’t been the implementation applied in almost all cases.
It shouldn't be a war on anything. Because we insist on treating adults like children, we're taking money that would have gone to tightly regulated pharmaceutical corporations like Bayer[1] and funneling it into violent criminal syndicates.
The "War on Drugs" is just a massive subsidy for the cartels via US markets. A sane approach to actually reduce drug use and fentanyl deaths would be to mirror the policies that have brought American tobacco use to a historic low and invest the tax revenue from legal narcotic sales into addiction treatment centers.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heroin#History
The imaginary clean dichotomy between the two is one of the convenient fictions that serves to make the war on drugs semi-palatable.
Portugal seems to legally distinguish between distributors and consumers just fine.
Perhaps there's some weight to the idea that demonization of distributors harms consumers—but this doesn't seem to be an ideological barrier between being aware of the harms to users and the obvious economic boon of taking advantage of regulation to exploit the market advantage.
I mean not to fan the flames of war on drugs - but its supposed to be targeting supply chain and large distributors
It's a 24 year old movie. Around that time the history of the drug war involved a lot more petty criminalization (look how far we've come). This discussion can veer.
I don't think there was any moment of history where that was true.
Besides, on a practical note, the war on drugs is what created large distributors. There weren't any when it started.
Yeah, but that "supposed to" is propaganda more than policy, and is quite far from a description of the consequences on the ground.
Even if it were just doing that (and I don't believe that's either the objective or the practical application, minor possession offenses targeting users are the vast majority of convictions), your street level dealer is so far down the chain to have no effect on supply and is a member of the community that you're hoping to help by imprisoning.
GPT is floating out nearly 8 million arrests for drug possession in America between 1990 and 2010.
No, that seems far too low. I'm getting disillusioned with GPT answering everything.
I don't find exact numbers for 1990-2010 but the number from 1996-2015 was over 32 million according to drugpolicyfacts.org [1]
https://www.drugpolicyfacts.org/table/total_arrests
Law enforcement doesn't typically target itself and the ruling class.
Former Senator Bob Menendez would be very surprised to learn that
Ignoring the fact that the word "typically" was highly operative, he's a great example of the point you're trying to undermine. The government never would have gone away empty handed with no conviction of any sort like they did the first time they went after Menendez in the late 2010s. A normal peasant would have had their life ruined and been just barely scraping by in the 2020s when he was doing the things that ultimately got him put away.
"Typically" being the key word here. Morons exist in every economic class. See: Eric Adams.
Anyway, Menendez has gotten off extremely lightly and everyone can see this.
I just find it odd to describe something that happens at the federal level on average once a year[1] as atypical. (And I'm sure even more frequently at the state level).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_federal_polit...
Once a year at more than 500 lawmakers and some number of senior executive branch appointees is <0.2%.
Convictions seem like a distraction from the narrative here: Menendez fucked over his constituents. Obviously every politician that does so should be equally castigated. The court is irrelevant in this context and should be considered a trailing symptom.
A simple policy could easily end those supply chains and large distributors. Just legalize it. Coke, meth, heroin. Legalize it, only allow it to be sold retail (no more street drugs), only allow licensed manufacturers to produce it, only allow them some very modest (capped at 2% over cost, maybe) profits. You get to choose where it's sold (out of liquor stores, most likely, instead of crack houses). You get to starve the cartels to death (they're cut out completely). No cops dying in shootouts, no dealers dying in shootouts, no bystanders dying in shootouts. And if you want tweekers to stop stealing copper wiring for scrap, just get rid of piss tests too... if drugs are so awful that people who give suck dick for it, then they're also so awful that people will get a minimum wage job scrubbing toilets for them. It's just that they can't because of piss tests.
Instead, we'll get another 100 years of half-assed decriminalization, where it's still illegal to sell, dealers are still motivated to kill cops, deadbeats, and rivals, where 100,000 people die because it's laced with fentanyl and even decriminalized illegal street drugs can't be regulated. I eagerly await all the downvotes this opinion will get.
100%. Decriminalizing possession only solves part of the problem: not ruining users lives even more than they have already done. Cracking down on dealers just incentives them to substitute stronger and more dangerous drugs in the pipeline.
One more change I would like to see: get rid of advertising this stuff. Giant billboards pushing alcohol, tobacco, and cannabis, are bad for all of us.
The actual study is about exposure to pretty extreme violence during pregnancy having epigenetic effects beyond one generation to F4. This is the first study to ever present such evidence in humans since some caution is warranted here with any conclusions.
Typical policymaker: "noted, so we have confirmation for condemning whole generations"
> we don’t really care about the human cost
Humanity risks a global return to a state of gleeful cruelty. "Lupus est homo homini". [1]
The well-being of people is a characteristic of successful society. And labour is fundamentally valuable. For those who seek economic pre-eminence, it makes perfect sense to invest in the people doing the work.
However, there are narrow-minded groups and individuals who see another equation: put workers in an exploitable condition and keep them in such condition over generations. Wars have been fought to preserve the investment in maintaining such conditions.
Labour is valuable, but the individual cost in human life is usually dismissed through demagogy and populism. We had broken the historical cycle of misery, but we now risk the achievements of our civilisation.
[1] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_homini_lupus
Maybe the only way to get out of a cycle is, trying to get out of the cycle?
Sure but I think if an appeal to empathy was going to work we’d already have seen it work.
Progress if often gradual and the result of continuous pressure over long periods of time. Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy, but I don't think "we'd have already seen it work" is a framing that makes sense.
Is it even desirable to avoid something nature selected for? The biggest assumption here is that these epigenetic mutations aren’t desirable for survival in a chaotic and violent world
It's only undesirable under the assumption that a chaotic and violent world is an acceptable state of affairs.
I could swallow that argument but in isolation this feels like using the abused as lab rats so we can more thoroughly destroy them at some future date
Progress is completely random and arbitrary. Sometimes it zooms forward, other times it regresses. The universe has no mystical rules that demand that it continue.
>Not everyone will respond to an appeal to empathy
I don't even think we use the word "empathy" correctly. It makes sense to me when we're talking about a non-general empathy, where you see a particular person close to you (physically, if not emotionally) and you feel for them. You can't have empathy with some abstract hypothetical. You can't even have empathy for some large loosely defined group of people of the non-hypothetical sort. And, most of all, it's largely spontaneous. If you go into it having already decided you feel empathy for them "just on principle", then what you're feeling isn't empathy. It's performative. It's virtue signaling. Pretending that is empathy does empathy no favors, and it does no favors to the people who are supposedly being empathized with. Because it is performative, it's always just this thin veneer of compassion over an inadequately hidden contempt. Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so successfully that they believe that it's real empathy, the hatred is buried deeper but festers all the more for it.
Appeal to pragmatism instead of empathy. You can make rational arguments if you're trying to be pragmatic. Appeal to justice. Appeal to anything but empathy. When I hear the word "empathy", I know that I'm about to have a load of horseshit dumped on me. You all know it too, even if you're worried that other people will shun you if you admit it out loud.
Would you accept the argument that someone who for whatever reason doesn't have empathy would also not be able to recognize it? For example, watching someone cry over current events would be unrecognizable to a sociopathic person. They may even accuse the person of lying or putting on a performance. Could you also accept the possibility that even if such a person could recognize empathy, they still lack or block the capacity to feel the empathy, and therefore the only use the recognition has is in manipulation (use it to corroborate a point, or use it to spread an attack, or just fuck it, just use it for anything since you can't actually feel it). You don't have to actually do anything with empathy, you can literally just sit there and cry. If you think empathy has a use first and foremost, then sure, I can see why you think someone is using it in a performance. You see, some of us cry because it hurts us.
To get a better understanding, let's use something very analogous - Cringe. When we watch someone do something cringe, we feel it. The same is true for empathy you see, that's what it is. We feel someone else's pain. Psychologists say those that don't feel it are sociopaths.
"Worse still may be those who lie to themselves so successfully that they believe that it's real empathy"
Again, you have difficulty identifying real or not real empathy. This is not a problem for people that were raised without confusion. You can just say I'm from environments where I couldn't figure out if anyone cared about me or not (common). Is there a universe where you can accept this diagnosis or are you pure? We are all a constant work in progress.
The gene expression of apathy needs to be studied as well.
The nature of the changes aren’t well understood. It seems dangerous to assume that they are unhealthy, or somehow destructive when the opposite could just as easily be true. The children of those experiencing violence may be more robust in some ways rather than the opposite. It’s an interesting finding, and something to be understood better, but jumping to the conclusion that it’s a bad thing it’s just dismissive of the robustness of humanity in general.
Future generations aren't voting in the next election.
If you're in a violent environment, that environment will be so antithetical to survivability, it's prudent for your genes to transcript you were in a violent environment for multiple generations.
Because later generations shouldn't be forced pay the cost for such violence that they didn't perpetrate or perpetuate.
To make it real when there's no compassion, loving kindness, or the golden rule:
War reparations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_reparations
I think you may want to re-read parent. They are saying that the reason you gave ( all of which were provided before ) barely restrained human kind from doing what it /was/is/will be doing.
If compassion and war reparations are insufficient to deter unjust violence, what will change the reinforced behaviors?
You have to reach the children and rehabilitate them. This is the type of damage the children are growing up with (HBO documentary from 2004 which I highly recommend people watch, the journalist got fatally shot filming it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isa5TRnidnk#t=30m30s
Counting on your fingers the dead. This has to be a rehabilitation effort, because it's just no way for children to talk and be.
Family therapy > Summary of theories and techniques: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_therapy#Summary_of_theo...
Expressive therapies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_therapies
Systemic therapy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_therapy :
> Based largely on the work of anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead, this resulted in a shift towards what is known as "second-order cybernetics" which acknowledges the influence of the subjective observer in any study, essentially applying the principles of cybernetics to cybernetics – examining the examination.
"What are the treatment goals?"
Clean Language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_language
...
In "Jack Ryan" (TV Series) Season 1 Episode 1, the children suffer from war trauma in their upbringing and that pervades their lives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Ryan_(TV_series)#Season_1...
In "Life is Beautiful" (1997) Italian children are trapped in war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Is_Beautiful
Magneto from X-Men (with the helmet) > Fictional character biography > Early life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto_(Marvel_Comics)#Early_...
"Chronicles of Narnia" (1939-1949) > Background and conception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chronicles_of_Narnia#Backg...
Ironically, the ability to reciprocate with violence is the only thing that has reliably deterred violence.
This seems like the flip-side of the argument that eschewing violence makes you honorable only if you're actually capable of committing violence in the first place. Eschewing violence because you're incapable of committing it just means you're weak.
If Country A knows Country B can't defend itself, it's natural to assume at some point A may attack B. If the countries are relatively equally armed and skilled in the use of those arms, it would take a lot more for one country to attack the other.
[dead]
War reparations gave us the Nazis, so they clearly don’t work. And compassion has given us everything we have seen thus far in history so we can conclude that too is ineffective.
Reparations certainly deterred further violent fascist statism in post WWII Germany.
Unfortunately the Berlin Wall.
WWI reparations were initially assessed by the Treaty of Versailles (1919) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations
Dulles, Dawes Plan > Results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawes_Plan
> Dawes won the 1925 Nobel Prize, WWI reparations obligations were reduced
Then the US was lending them money and steel because it was so bad there, and then we learned they had been building tanks and bombs with our money instead of railroads and peaceful jobs.
Business collaboration with Nazi Germany > British, Swiss, US, Argentinian and Canadian banks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_collaboration_with_Na...
And then the free money rug was pulled out from under them, and then the ethnic group wouldn't sell their paintings to help pay the debts of the war and subsequent central economic mismanagement.
And then they invaded various continents, overextended themselves when they weren't successfully managing their own country's economy, and the Allied powers eventually found the art (and gold) and dropped the bomb developed by various ethnic groups in the desert and that was that.
Except for then WWII reparations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_reparations
The US still occupies or inhabits Germany, which is Russia's neighbor.
Trump was $400 million in debt to Deutsche Bank AG (of Germany and Russia now) and had to underwrite said loan himself due to prior defaults. Nobody but Deutsche Bank would loan Trump (Trump Vodka, University,) money prior to 2016. Also Russian state banks like VEB, they forgot to mention.
Business projects of Donald Trump in Russia > Timeline of Trump business activities related to Russia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_projects_of_Donald_...
It looks like - despite attempted bribes of foreign heads of state with free apartment - there will not be a Trump Tower Moscow.
"Biden halts Trump-ordered US troops cuts in Germany" (2021) https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-military-f...
> art (and gold)
"The Monuments Men" (2014) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monuments_Men
Not sure that the guy who thinks "future generations shouldn't pay the cost for something they didn't do" is thinking his position when his very next thought is "we'll make the great-grandchildren of the warmongers pay cash to the great-grandchildren of the victorious warmongers".
You could argue that’s the trauma expressing itself through derivative real experiences into the future.
It is the purpose of criminal and civil procedure to force parties that caused loss, violence, death and trauma to pay for their offenses.
We have a court system that is supposed to abide Due Process so that there are costs to inflicting trauma (without perpetuating a vicious cycle).
This is basic Mediterranean basin wisdom, known for a very long time: “I am a jealous God punishing the sins of the parents to the third and fourth generation.” One of the two mentions also says blessings are passed down 1000 generations, both of which seem pretty in line with modern evolutionary and epigenetic theory.
These seem to be rather different things though. I'm pretty sure this biblical passage is referring to a metaphysical concept, involving morality. Plus this article is a study about being on the receiving end of violence, not being the perpetrator of.
Bronze age morality was rather different than what most readers here will have in mind when seeing you use that word.
It does, doesn't it. The undesirable traits are weeded out and the desirable traits remain in the pool.
Exodus 20:5, “You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations o those who hate Me,”
It's repeated in like dozen different places that you punish people for their parents sins to a few generations down.
On the other hand Ezekiel 18:20, “The person who sins will die. The son will not bear the punishment for the father’s iniquity, nor will the father bear the punishment for the son’s iniquity; the righteousness of the righteous will be upon himself, and the wickedness of the wicked will be upon himself.”
And then there's the original sin - which is punished for infinite number of generations.
Bible is using the oldest trick in the world - holding every position at the same time :) That way no matter what happens you can find a quote which supports it (also contradicts, but you don't share these).
The Bible is a small library of different books written by different people at different times. I don't think it's all that surprising that there are contradictions. In fact, I would say that pretty much every faith tradition with a long literary history suffers from this problem. I don't think that undermines that idea we can glean meaningful wisdom from sacred texts.
Flat contradiction undermines wisdom and empowers sophists. The most interesting aspect to sacred texts is the question of why some succeeded and some failed. What is the appeal? Within that context, the contradictions themselves serve a purpose, increasing the utility of the text particularly with those with a taste for power.
The problem is that sacred texts like the Bible (other examples might be the Pali Cannon in Buddhism or Vedas and Upanishads in Hinduism) do not contain "flat contradictions". If people hundreds of years apart write down conflicting ideas that later get complied together by another person/group who are using those texts for non-logical spiritual guidance, in what way is that a meaningful contradiction? Also, the idea that wisdom must be strictly rational is a modern, scientific standard that these texts fundamentally disagree with.
Using any of these passages as a prooftext for a particular position about the effects of God's wrath and drawing a singular conclusion from them is indeed incorrect, but it does not mean that there is a real contradiction. For example take these two passages.
Proverbs 26:4 (ESV) "Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself." Proverbs 26:5 (ESV) "Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes."
They are "contradictory" but yet right next to each other. It can rather be taken that these are both true in certain contexts and must be held in tension against one another and applied with wisdom.
There are multiple instances of this in the old and new testaments.
I think the interesting thing here though is the notion of `am a jealous God`.
Note: Exodus 20:5 and Similar Passages: The concept of "visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation" is often understood in the context of the collective nature of ancient Israelite society. It emphasizes the idea that the consequences of sin can affect subsequent generations, particularly in a communal and covenantal context. This does not necessarily mean direct punishment, but rather the natural repercussions and influence of one generation's behavior on the next.
So one interpretation is that: these people's descendants are not directly punished bust just less favorable by God given the jealous nature of God (i.e. the jealous nature to the degree that is expressed in Exodus 20:5 if we take Exodus 20:5 at face value as composed by Moses at the cultural-political time when he received the Commandments where God proclaimed that He is a jealous God)
On the other hand, regarding Ezekiel 18:20, it is a verse that is a part of a broader discussion in Ezekiel 18 that emphasizes individual responsibility when it was composed by the prophet Ezekiel ~6th century BCE, during the Babylonian exile. So once again, one good interpretation can be that due to the cultural-political background at that time, God's message to humanity (for the betterment of humanity) was in a tone where He emphasized less on His jealous aspect and more on the individualism of sins - which is interestingly very similar to the idea of karma formulated in Shakyamuni's Dharma, which was also around that time in human history.
> This does not necessarily mean direct punishment, but rather the natural repercussions and influence of one generation's behavior on the next.
This is a rationalization. If you try to interpret it honestly you can find dozen different places where god punish random people for sins of their relatives (for example "unoborn kids" in cities genocided by Old Testament Israelites either through regular war crimes or direct God's magical intervention).
And then there's the fragment that says that God will not punish a city if there's even one honest man there.
The only way to make it consistent is to ignore contradictions. And I'd say it would be easier to ignore the few ones that are against collective responsibilty (because there's far fewer of them).
> This is a rationalization. If you try to interpret it honestly
You are proceeding to not try to interpret it honestly; and thinking you are a genius for pointing out a supposed contradiction, because this hasn't been studied and researched for over 3,000 years at this point.
> for example "unoborn kids" in cities genocided by Old Testament Israelites either through regular war crimes or direct God's magical intervention
You seem to forget that Egypt, the land where they came from, was literally putting them to genocide first by ordering them to kill all male children; and any country they relocated to, would also have happily committed genocide against them if possible.
We also know from both the Bible and remaining physical evidence that the exterminated tribes were practicing horrific activities of their own. The Canaanites, for example, practiced child sacrifice to Molek, and (though not in the Bible, but from remaining historical evidence) even practiced ritual cannibalism. A command to exterminate them therefore should not be interpreted as intrinsically immoral or undeserved.
1. Astrology was debated even longer and also still exists. It's not an argument.
2. I'm not claiming to be genious. In fact I was pretty hardcore Catholic for like 22 years before I stopped lying to myself.
> You seem to forget that Egypt
Genociding Phillites' kids because some adult Egyptians were killing Jews is evil.
> The Canaanites, for example, practiced child sacrifice to Molek
Their infants did?
> before I stopped lying to myself
Yeah, no; you found something the church called a sin that you could not, or did not, want to overcome.
> Genociding Phillites' kids because some adult Egyptians were killing Jews is evil.
If evil is only an opinion of mind, who is to say? Russians call Ukrainians evil; Ukrainians call Russia evil; both kill the other. In your opinion, it was evil; but if you were forced between accepting a genocide against yourself on one hand, or fleeing and causing a genocide to survive, you may have different opinions.
> Yeah, no; you found something the church called a sin that you could not, or did not, want to overcome.
what a convenient all-purpose dismissal of any experiences that challenge your view
Sheesh, good thing G-d decided to take a chill pill somewhere between the Old and New Testaments.
While the article frames this phenomenon as self-evidently negative, I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a driver of island tameness (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_tameness) in humans. To quote Theodore Roosevelt:
"The curse of every ancient civilization was that its men in the end became unable to fight. Materialism, luxury, safety, even sometimes an almost modern sentimentality, weakened the fibre of each civilized race in turn; each became in the end a nation of pacifists, and then each was trodden under foot by some ruder people that had kept that virile fighting power the lack of which makes all other virtues useless and sometimes even harmful."
I don't know that this is super well-founded: It seems similar to the "Fremen Mirage" [1], and misses that in most cases the society that escapes war for longer will have time and energy to build infrastructure and accumulate resources that provide a decisive advantage in conflict and defense. Looking back at history it's rare that the "virile fighting" nation/group wins against a more "civilized" adversary that's better organized and resourced.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
Of course, then we have groups like 'The United States of America', which has been at war basically every single hour in the last 100 years, and seems to be doing just right. At some point, you become powerful enough so that infrastructure does not help against you anymore (and may even become a liability: The conflicts the US does the worst in is wherever guerrilla warfare is waged, not where there are highways and telecommunication networks).
Respectfully. The idea that civilization makes men weak is bullshit. It was the agrarian centralized societies that waged war and destroyed the nomadic hunter gatherers. The more centralized, the more technologically advanced, the more successful a society is in war.
The exception to this rule is when a society destroyed itself through civil war. The western Roman empire destroyed itself during the Crisis of the Third Century when one regional commander after another declared himself emperor. Even during Augustus' time, the elite had a habit of cutting off their sons thumbs to avoid being conscripted into the legions.
The steppe nomads who conquered China (Mongols), Persia (Mongols), Byzantines (Turks), and India (Moghuls) were able to rule for centuries thereafter even after becoming "civilized". I would also argue this "civilizing" process was also a myth. The ruling elite kept their own traditions and cultures and lived separately from the people they ruled.
Civilization makes a society successful in war because of the destructive power of the weaponry available. But it absolutely seems reasonable that individual people could be less fit for physical combat as the above aspects of civilization (materialism, luxury, etc.)
> I suspect the lack of war-related stress is also a driver of island tameness [...] in humans
Why?
This might have been true before technology but yet again the nerds ruin everything. Now that I think about it, this theory doesn’t really hold past tribalism. The Industrial Revolution is why England could conquer half the planet, not the brutish nature of the English.
Maybe in the future even the drones will have ennui and want to become dancers.
> The Industrial Revolution is why England could conquer half the planet, not the brutish nature of the English
I don't think that quote is about being brutish. The idea is that when times get easy, defence lowers (as why spend on defence?) and eventually someone else who is not living in luxury takes over, if they can reach you. I don't know if it's a valid theory, but I don't think it's about anyone's nature in particular.
Furthermore the Industrial Revolution stimulated the need for a trading empire to supply its materials. Nowadays we have global free trade (enforced by the US Navy - yet more technology) so trading empires are unnecessary.
Technology may be more predictive of conflict abroad than at home. If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not be able to bomb our way out of it.
> If we faced a land invasion, for example, we would not be able to bomb our way out of it.
Why would you state this as if it were fact? It's not true.
Our own generals bombed the most important trade hub of the time, Atlanta, during the civil war.
Bombs are highly effective, and location matters little to their effectiveness or usefullness.
We dropped plenty of bombs in unreachable parts of Afghanistan. Were those effective? Yes, they were. Were those bombs as effective, in that region of uninhabitable tunnels and cliffs, as they would be in an urban setting? No, of course not.
Bombs are still the go-to attack and defense strategy. Bombs reduce the need for boots on the ground. Bombs reduce the enemy's ability to go to ground and hide.
If we faced a land invasion, in the USA, we would absolutely-certainly utilize modern weaponry, including bombs, to displace the enemy.
To say otherwise is to disregard history. To say otherwise is to place hope in pie-in-the-sky feelings and not the data we've accumulated over the last 200 years.
We dropped plenty of bombs in unreachable parts of Afghanistan. Were those effective? Yes, they were
In the short term, yes. In the long term the US eventually gave up and left. Likewise, the US bombed Vietnam heavily, eventually gave up and left. You can't hold territory with bombs.
To say otherwise is to disregard history. To say otherwise is to place hope in pie-in-the-sky feelings and not the data we've accumulated over the last 200 years.
Every military historian will tell you the same thing I just did, and cite examples going back thousands of years - military arson serves the same function as bombing.
We evidently hate the weak, egalitarianism, happiness, pacifism, jainists/unitarians universalists/Baháʼí, etc. Humanity's favorite emotion is Schadenfreude.
This sword of damocles shit that justifies the boot being on our face forever can fuck right off.
Honestly it's one of those ideas that make less sense the more you think about it. That quote and wikipedia link is drawing a connection between history as it was understood in the 19th century (e.g. unilineal evolutionism) and the behaviour of dodos.
Does this rehabilitate Lysenkoism?
I am a little confused by how there can be epigenetic genetic modifications. I'm not a biologist, but it seems to me that if it's epigenetic, it's not genetic and vice-versa.
The genes (code sequences stored in the DNA) are not modified.
Epigenetics is a recent discovery that the genes can be muted or not expressed).
The mechanism is that parts of the DNA strand often curl themselves up in a ball which prevents themselves from being replicated/expressed. Researchers are discovering there are many factors that influence this behavior.
I think it’s better to describe methylation as up or down regulation.
Maybe Darwinian evolution has the intrinsic tendency to evolve Lamarckian heredity mechanisms.
"While our genes are not changed by life experiences, they can be tuned through a system known as epigenetics."
It is indeed not a modification of the genetic code. And the transmission of epigenetic state from one generation to the next is much less straightforward.
The article says this.
The article clearly implies a modify of the genes. The genome is altered.The actual study doesn’t make that claim, the article is presenting it incorrectly. They’re talking about a methylation on certain genes. Think of it as amplification or attenuation and of a signal. The signal is the same, just weaker or stronger.
I'm also very skeptic of the way these affirmations are made. Other studies I've read boil down to epigenetic changes caused by stress, not actual DNA rewriting, otherwise it wouldn't go back to normal ever. In other words, these epigenetic changes are directly proportional to how stressful the environment remains.
The article mentions Hama, where a massacre occurred, and 40 years later the inhabitants still show epigenetic changes caused by stress. Surely the environment still being stressful is more to blame than their ancestor's genetic memory.
There's great danger of misinterpreting this kind of research to bolster ideological agendas. I've seen this misused as "my grandpa was a victim of the holocaust, so I, born into and living a comfortable and peaceful life, am also a holocaust victim and deserve respect".
The press release writer was a bit shit at understanding basic scientific jargon. The research only finds epigenetic markers. There are no genetic changes. There are detectable changes to gene expression, and that's it.
I'm not a biologist either, but from my reading there are many cellular elements that influence genetic expression that are not encoded in DNA. And those elements can mutate as a result of the individual's experience during their lifetime. Some of them have independent genetic lines. DNA = behavior is reductive.
To a very minor degree. If DNA is a compiled binary, epigenetics is like the settings database. It can toggle and alter behaivor and it has some degree of persistence, but ultimately it can only change things in ways allowed by the binary.
I'm perplexed by this university press release. Do they really not link to the underlying research article that they're discussing?
Is that a genuine question?
You’ve never once seen a university press release boiled down for the general public, without a link to underlying research?
you can put the researchers names into a search engine (ask an academic librarian if you need help). I'm not sure if it's in the scope of the press release to link directly to primary sources.
To give you a better understanding of how this works, if my university didn’t include a link to my research in the press release about my publication, I’d contact them to issue a correction. That’s how fundamental it is to link to the research article.
this is a blog, not a rigorous publication with citations or formality.
That's a misunderstanding. This is not a "blog"; this is a press release from a university on its newsfeed. Linking to their own researcher's work is not a matter of being "rigorous" and is unrelated (and not at all similar) to academic citations.
Yes, it is. Top universities do.
I'm not sure why they are calling out a specific conflict. People don't have objective violence barometers. Every act of new worst violence you ever experience is the worst ever until something worse happens.
Not exactly the "first human evidence of a phenomenon". There was an article published in 2013 about the 1836 potato famine. Descendants of those who experienced the famine first hand, expressed altered genome due to the stress.
https://gizmodo.com/how-an-1836-famine-altered-the-genes-of-...
Not genome. Epigenome.
"offers the first human evidence"
That's untrue. There was plenty of evidence for epigenetics before this study. The one that I remember is the Överkalix study in Sweden.
There isn’t a single mother human study showing methylation persisting on the same genes across 3 generations. It’s only been demonstrated in mice once prior and with some controversy.
> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
Alas, a new target for lasting, inter-generational psychological assault.
There are some uncomfortable truths coming down the science pipe.
It will turn out that we're not all the same, at all. And that a ton of the behavioral traits we see everyday are indeed genetic. Yes, I mean crime stats.
The pushback will be immense, as it goes after foundational beliefs of modern society, deep blasphemy - but we have to trust the science.
The concept of 'blood memory' is real.
I'm happy to hear that you agree that we must fearlessly follow the science no matter where it leads us.
Unfortunately in this case, this news item deals with epigenetics that affects gene expression, not changes in actual genes. The same thing would happen to humans of every race and ethnicity, given the same conditions.
It might be uncomfortable to confront things you'd rather take for granted, but as long as you're willing to accept the truth when facts don't align with your feelings then have no worries. You're on the right path.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_of_slaves_in_the_Unite...
This feels dangerously close to eugenics
The real "uncomfortable truth" that the GP blithely glosses is the effect of multi-generational poverty. If a society has determined that some people are entirely expendable, then the misery of the latter over generations is easily dismissed as "biological destiny".
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I didn't read this study, but I can't help but comment that past studies on this topic are of dubious quality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma#Criti... so very likely this is nonsense too.
I think the main problem is that something like "science proves generational trauma is real" is a nice headline, so people p-hack it into existence. "Science proves that generational trauma is not real" is just a null hypothesis being confirmed - not a publishable result and nobody cares, so you'll never hear about it. So be very skeptical of nice headlines, especially in university press releases!
I saw a video about a study on Japanese villagers nearby seismic fault or volcanos. And IIRC the villagers facing the dangers directly had different tempers probably driven by the constant risks and traumas from past catastrophes, while the villagers further away and shielded by hills, were calmer.
Mind over matter. Don't forget to meditate, and try to keep the loop running in the background too.
Reminds me of Scott Alexander's “GATTACA II: EPI-GATTACA”: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/06/19/the-gattaca-trilogy/
I heard that, in the Netherlands after WW2, the descendants of people who starved were shorter in height even though they were born after the war.
Admittedly this was from a Dr Karl podcast.
It's in the article, and it's been overweight.
I have Aphantasia. I always wondered whether the physical and emotional violence my mother experienced increased the probability for it. I guess I'll never know, but it's interesting to see that epigenetics seems to be in play.
Dexter and his brother Brian are perfect examples of this
So why won't people listen to me that compassion for all human beings is the only excellent choice for us, both personally and in our cultures/societies/groups?
The side that takes pleasure in the misery of others does so because the negative effects can be -- just as this title states -- deleterious for generations.
We must evolve ourselves to, instead, sow the seeds of compassionate concern for all human beings to rid ourselves of the damaging effects of abuse of every kind, between any two people or groups of people.
Yes, accomplishing any progress in that direction is fundamentally difficult because it goes against our animal physiology and negative potential, not to mention the even more generations of institutional pack mentality that so permeates our cultures' seeking of power.
We could choose peace and compassion, if we chose to, but such a bold endeavor takes utter commitment and real work, for each and every one of us.
Compassion is always the solution to ALL our problems, because the lack of compassion is ALWAYS the fundamental cause of EACH and EVERY one.
It is both that simple, and that difficult, but it is also rewarding beyond normal comprension, for it is the most real kind of magic in this multiverse.
"Love, baby, love." --Louis Armstrong
Research area that would be extremely interesting: whether and how epigenetic changes of this type correlated with social-political behavior and values.
Meanwhile, in Gaza...
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The original research[0] is available for free online.
It goes into more detail about how they established the genetic signatures and has a lot more images as well.
Epigenetic signatures of intergenerational exposure to violence in three generations of Syrian refugees
[0] - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-89818-z
Generational trauma is really hard to resolve. A therapist once told me "family systems don't like change." The really old family dynamics have a way of being passed down and reinforced. We settle into roles that perpetuate them.
Interesting that there is not just social pressure but also genetic pressure that may be perpetuating the trauma.
My grandfather drove a tank through Europe for the allies during WW2 and I know that is still impacting me and my kids. He self medicated his presumed PTSD with alcohol and died young before I was born. That impacted my father and the way he related to me. And I am sure it impacts how I relate to my kids too. I don't drink anymore because that history scares me. The rise in fascist and nationalist ideologies scares me too.
If we forget history we are doomed to repeat it. Both at an individual and societal level.
A study of people who were adopted as babies could be interesting, depending on circumstances the stress on the birth mother could be reflected in the child but the dynamics of the birth family after birth would no longer be in play. I am specifically thinking of Ireland where there are a significant number of people in their 40s up that were the result of pretty much forced adoption due to the societal stigma of getting pregnant out of wedlock which would have been very stressful as the mothers were sent to mother and baby homes once they began to show.
My grandfather also drank himself to death for similar reasons. What scares me is that as a society we forget too quickly the true cost and suffering caused by war.
I'm very interested in this branch of same-generation evolution, as this is one of the core components excluded from Natural Selection theory
I'm very skeptical about it, but they do suggest they have a control group to observe in this study. Despite not being able to pinpoint an actual effect of these genetic markets.
"Passed down through their mothers, this genetic imprint offers the first human evidence of a phenomenon previously documented only in animals: The genetic transmission of stress across multiple generations."
I wish reporters were required to research their claims.
Apart from epigenetics, which influences offspring but confers no permanent genetic change, there is no inheritance of acquired traits. On this topic, for political reasons Joseph Stalin promoted Trofim Lysenko's incorrect views in this topic, which set Soviet genetics back decades. More here: "The destructive role of Trofim Lysenko in Russian Science" (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6777473/)
Articles like this should at least explain how and why their claims differ from established genetic principles.
Lots of people here stating that this is an epigenetic change rather than a change in the genetic sequence, which I think is missing the point somewhat.
Epigenetic changes are an important part of your genetic make-up. To give you an example, the only reason that your skin cells remain your skin cells when they divide, and your liver cells remain your liver cells when they divide, is due to the epigenetic make up. Their DNA is the same, but the cells are very different, and epigenetics pass that information along when the code is copied.
In the same way, these stress-related epigenetic changes are being copied down and inherited by the generation two under.
This is already known, I think it was first seen in the Swedish famine cohort. At that time it was not clear it was due to epigenetics, but there was a clear signal in the health of those descendants [1], published here in 2002.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/5200859
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> The idea that trauma and violence can have repercussions into future generations should help people be more empathetic, help policymakers pay more attention to the problem of violence
This sounds like it was custom written perfectly to support censorshit. The usual "oh no... hurt feelings" stuff
Transgenerational epigenetic inheritance is mostly bogus. This research is usually invoked as an alternative to the much more straight-forward, easily verifiable influences of normie genetics. Since these are not deemed socially desirable, this epigenetic pseudoscience gets millions in funding.
See: https://www1.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2005heredita...