Your DNA may carry a ‘memory’ of your living conditions in childhood
scienceblog.com
scienceblog.com
Of course such an opinion might be considered 'heretic' among the scientific society, which I found to be way too dogmatic on most aspects.
Go ahead and design some falsifiable and testable experiments to prove this. You can whine about dogmatism or you can challenge it. I suspect like more Lamarckian ideas its quickly refuted, but you are welcome to try. That's how science works.
As far as I, any many others, can tell, random mutation and natural selection works really, really well, but would love to be proved wrong. Please note "proven" isn't flowerly speech about how some ideas "feel" righter than others.
Sorry, I didn't mean to sound like a dismissive asshole, but epigenetics is still a young science. We can't even tell if this stuff in inheritable or if it even makes any difference if it was. Epigenetic inheritance even if real doesn't change genes it just changes expression. Its really not like Lamarck at all (if you are fat and like rap music, you will have fat children who like rap music because magic, that's why!).
I have seen more than a share of people that call themselves scientists literally laugh at an argument and dismiss it without analysis or a counter-argument.
In fact, from a quick glance in history we see science prove itself wrong over and over again, which is natural, but it's very common to contemporary scientists think they are just right.
All I'm saying is that sometimes, not all times, scientists appear more like cult-followers than researchers.
That's a feature, not a bug. Think something is wrong? Prove it. Then it becomes the status quo. Then that gets either refined or dismissed by a better theory. You may say this process is evolutionary...(oh, I love puns).
Are there egos and politics involved? Yes, just like in any human endeavor.
What would need to be shown in order to support Lamarkianism is that the methylation patterns are passed on to offspring (and showing that the methylation patterns in childhood were different from those at birth, would probably be helpful as well).
It is fallacious to extrapolate from patterns of reproduction at the cellular level of amino acids to reproduction patterns at the organism level of sperm and egg. It is akin to applying quantum mechanics to billiard balls.
What the study does show is that there are long term effects of childhood living conditions which manifest themselves at the celluar level. Given that we are readily able to observe some effects of childhood living conditions at the macro level of the human organism (e.g. physiological manifestations of diet or altitude), finding their biochemical mode of expression should not be entirely unexpected.
http://www.jstor.org/pss/10.1086/650443]
After studying the issue, I'd be willing to bet a friend a lot of money that natural selection alone will be proven insufficient to fully explain evolution.
Here's a link to the paper: http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...
The relevant info is in the Results and Discussion section.
http://www.drugs.com/clinical_trials/turned-off-cannabinoid-...
Essentially in some cancers the cells lose their ability to uptake cannabinoids because those receptors get methylated, and so by unmethylating them (and adding extra cannabinoids) you can attack the cancer.
http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/epigenetics/inheritan...
Our understanding is still very limited, though. And yes, it is kind of ironic that Lamarck is getting a jab in after all this time :)
Who knows, maybe next thing we'll find is that the concept of "race" is not only a "social construct"?
In any case, I'm not too sure about the scientific community being so easily accepting of Darwin. It's true that evolution (that is, the gradual changes in the characteristics of populations) was nearly universally accepted relatively quickly, but natural selection as a mechanism was not. In fact, for some decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries natural selection was widely regarded as a minor contributor to evolution.
This was not a matter of anyone believing that natural selection didn't occur, but simply an argument over the relative magnitudes of different forces. Alternative drivers of evolution included neo-Lamarckism. Notably, estimates of the age of the Earth at the time were very much lower than our current ones and many scientists believed (correctly) that natural selection was too slow a process to have produced the variety of life observed over a 10-100 million year timespan.
This is further supported by historical studies showing consistent mutation rates overtime. There are different mechanisms that result in population wide changes, but that doesn't exclude random mutations (in the general sense, be it point mutations or transpositions) from being the progenitor of all new genetic information.
In what way does it not seem credible?
It's somewhat absurd to compare the credibility of genetics as a field to what is still almost entirely conjecture.
From our brief history of mankind, I don't think there's enough information and hard fact to either prove or refute the random factor, as far as I know it is just accepted. I could also be wrong since I'm not all that up to date in this matter.
The impact of this potential new mechanism of inheritance is unknown, but it will only add to our current understanding of how things work. It will not tear down our understanding.
Females are born with all their eggs, so any changes in methylation that occur to these eggs will persist into adulthood (I assume). But is it possible that these eggs are somehow protected from this alteration? As for sperm, these are produced within the testes following puberty, and are generated continuously. Therefore, in order to pass down altered methylation, the original gamete cells responsible for generating sperm would have to be altered. But if you wanted to do this successfully, you'd have to make sure to alter ALL the gamete cells. Otherwise you're gambling as to which sperm cell hits the pay load. Again, I'm curious if these cells are more or less prone to altered methylation.
I find this whole concept fascinating! Imagine...your dad gets bullied as a kid, results in altered methylation pattern, and this gets passed to you! Wow.
You can see this clearly in london - it's pretty easy to observe which Africans migrated to England at perhaps age 10, vs those who were born and grew up in England.
What do I have to look for? How have you validated your observations? Got any examples?
Look at this link for example: http://www.traedays.com/blog/2006/06/are-you-thinking-what-i...
Africa is the most diverse continent in terms of phenotype and genetics. For example: a West African, an Ethiopian and a San person have very little in common, physically speaking. It is a bit like saying African Americans are 'African' while most have admixtures with non-Africans.
Studies showed that Ethiopians (toward 50-55%) and Kushites (towards 35% for Bejas) have an important western asian input so they tend to look like transitional people.
Take a look at this link: http://www.traedays.com/blog/2006/06/are-you-thinking-what-i...
http://www.amazon.com/History-White-People-Irvin-Painter/dp/...
is that the ancient Greek authors were overwhelmingly of the opinion that what made different people groups different from one another was different living environments (climate and topography), with the Greeks of course thinking that their living environment tended to produce superior people.