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Comment by etatoby | Hacker News Reader

The larger hyphothesis, if I understand correctly, is that RNA (and possibly DNA?) is the seat of long-term memory and has some hereditary or otherwise physically transferable component, while synapses would be our short-term memory, as well as the expression or "cache" of the former.

This, as well as the worm-eating-worm-acquires-its-memory research, if true (a big if) would vindicate so many theories, findings, and "magic" traditions from around the world.

From Carl Jung's Collective Unconscious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_unconscious to many old cultural traditions of eating certain animal/human parts in order to acquire their psychological properties such as courage.

I, for one, am looking forward to my injections of foreign languages and musical instrument playing.

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> This, as well as the worm-eating-worm-acquires-its-memory research, if true (a big if) would vindicate so many theories, findings, and "magic" traditions from around the world.

We don't have the same digestive metabolism as worms. I don't think the RNA is going to make it from your stomach to your brain.

I don't think so either, but that's not science. I haven't checked, and apparently neither has anyone else. yet

Further study is required. Facts must be established.

I mean if the RNA is going to dissolve in the stomach acid. Then there is no way it is going to make it to the brain? And does the RNA transfer through blood on its own? That's science.

The only possible explanation is that they picked up something else along RNA that does affect memory and they are not aware of it.

A reasonable hypothesis. I like it. I'm not a scientist, so I do not know how to specifically verify or disprove it, but my understanding is that the only way to be sure is to actually perform an experiment to check; removing or controlling for all other variables.

I'm by no means educated about ways how RNA could get from food into your own cells, but saying "RNA is dissolved by stomach acid" is a bit too easy. HCl peaks only after a big meal with protein, and some people generally have low stomach acid. Then there's the mucosa of the mouth and esophagus, through which some food is absorbed before it even hits the digestive organs (even bypassing the liver AFAIK). It might still get dissolved as soon as it hits your bloodstream, or destroyed by antibodies, etc..

> some people generally have low stomach acid

Not to the extent that you (and many others) believe. The stomach is always very acidic (pH 1–3), and this acidity is tightly regulated. Contrary to what you’ve said, the pH is raised (and hence acidity lowered) when consuming food (because HCl is used up in the digestive process). That said, much of the digestion of RNAs happens through enzymes, not acid, so the point is moot. It’s known that the human GI tract is highly efficient in digesting oligonucleotides. Very little (and of that, only small fragments) has a chance of being taken up.

> I haven't checked, and apparently neither has anyone else.

Wait, how did you figure that out? Of course this has been checked. Here’s a review: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4446746/

Anyway, the tl;dr is that, at best, very short RNA fragments would survive being digested in vertebrates (but most likely not even that). This doesn’t preclude the transfer of information by RNA via food but it severely limits it.

Also, to reiterate the point I’ve made elsewhere: RNA is unstable and short-lived and therefore unsuitable as a long-term memory carrier. It can act as a short-term carrier under specific circumstances (and that’s arguably its main function in the cell anyway).

Yep. Good and valid point. I should do my homework before posting. :)

Count me out.

If you think we have problems with back doors in systems now, just imagine how that would go in a world of injectable RNA memories.

"So did you learn Chinese?"

"Yeah it was great!"

"Cool, let's go finish that Tor guide for oppressed Chinese citizens!"

"No, you know what, that project makes me feel really uncomfortable now, for reasons I can't quite define. I'm off now, gonna go sell my iPhone on eBay and buy a Huawei. Cya!"

When memories are consolidated at night during NREM sleep there's a lot of information transfer within the brain but not from the brain down to your gonads. Also we can look at the DNA of a gamete and see how it differs from other cells and there are usually a few mutations but you can't encode much in <16 bits.

All this would have been reasonable speculation in the 1960s when Dune was written but science has moved on.

I mean, you’re totally right to be sceptical of heritable learned experience but your description is off: Firstly, what do these 16 bits refer to (a single nucleobase encodes 2 bits of information and there are easily > 8 mutations from a given individual to the next)? Secondly, the posited mechanism for these acquired traits would be epigenetic, not genetic. I.e. it wouldn’t be encoded in genetic mutations but in other chemical modifications of the DNA (and, more generally, the gamete).

This has conceptual and practical problems in itself (notably due to germline reprogramming) and as I explained in other comments, the current majority view in the field is that it plays a minor role in evolution at best. But it’s not fundamentally impossible and, at least under very specific and constrained circumstances in certain species, it does happen.

It also fits the trope of "a writer wrote about the exact thing decades ago!" (Frank Herbert, the Dune series)

I know Kung Fu.

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