Transmission of epigenetic alterations across generations in mammals | Hacker News Reader

Transmission of epigenetic alterations across generations in mammals

pnas.org

40 pointsstevenwoo12 comments

The university press release https://news.wsu.edu/press-release/2026/02/20/toxic-exposure...

The actual title, which is what should be used on submissions, is "Stability of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of adult-onset disease and parturition abnormalities". If you want to link to the press release, you should link to that—note it also doesn't use your editorialized title.

The article isn't about the fungicide (were the exposures close to what humans experience?) but about the possibility of epigenetic transmission.

Edit: "When pregnancy was confirmed, on days 8 through 14 of gestation [31] the females were administered daily intraperitoneal injections of vinclozolin (100 mg/kg BW/day, Chem Services, Westchester PA, USA)" - not comparable to humans. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6114855/

Given our careless use of pesticides, fungicides, plasticizers, xenoestrogens, PFAS in pesticides, sewage sludge, and cigarette smoke, we're dooming the population to have a fertility of zero. I understand that the article is about cancer, not fertility, but the general argument of accumulated germline damage prevails. It's no wonder that the West requires immigrants to preserve its population because the domesticated ones don't have children when they're young and can't have children when they're no longer young.

Granted, I don't mean to overlook the economic reasons; it just doesn't excuse the environmental reasons.

The thing is, that declining birth rates in the west are more about economic and social factors than they are about any environmental concerns.

Birth control, postponing having a first child, economic factors all far outweigh any environmental issue.

Go back 100 years, 25 percent of the us population was farming. Kids weren't a burden they were free labor. Now children represent a massive cost to parents, that does not provide any benefit. Furthermore having kids today, in the west, is, to be blunt, odious. People dont want to have 2.2 children so we can even maintain replacement levels.

I know a lot of women who want children, but don't feel economically secure enough to make it happen. Wage stagnation hits hard because nobody makes enough to fund an entire family on their own.

That's a hypothesis that I've seen a lot, but it has zero basis in reality. Wealthy countries have fewer births. Countries that offer benefits and incentives to have kids have fewer births. What countries have the most births? Ones where women are treated as cattle.

Now the interesting thing: those countries also have rapidly declining birth rates. Birth rate decline is a global thing that knows no borders. Even in countries where kids are still seen as free labor, almost nobody is having the 12 kids that they used to.

> more about economic and social factors than they are about any environmental concerns.

Each of the three classes of reasons is important here. No one class is reason to ignore another. The environmental class is however the most important as its adverse effect lasts for the most number of generations.

>Now children represent a massive cost to parents, that does not provide any benefit.

Obviously not everyone has to, but many people find their meaning in life through raising their children.

>The thing is, that declining birth rates in the west are more about economic and social factors

If that were the case, this declining fertility rate would cluster around certain socioeconomic cohorts in ways we just don't see. The pattern I see is a more alarming one, where it follows more closely teenage suicide patterns in a contagion-oriented model. Even in those places in Africa where fertility remains high, it drops most sharply among those who are in contact the most with people from the west, and in proportion to the amount of contact.

When self-surveyed people say "it's the economy", they're being put on the spot to answer a question they've thought little about and don't even really know why. They grope for whatever answer makes them sound the least stupid.

>People dont want to have 2.2 children so we can even maintain replacement levels.

Likely, people want far more children than that, and do not know it. This is why the women who "do not want children" are the ones that have had 3 abortions these past 10 years despite the ease with which one might remain sexually active and yet not pregnant. They think they want one thing, and far more primitive parts of their brains/psychologies want something else. Why people hop from "relationship" to "relationship", because that's the impulse when mating was barren long ago... and they chalk it up to some personality incompatibility out of a magazine article.

Nature will find a way to mitigate this, at least long-term. The price will not be small though.

Since the government chooses to ignore the science and risks, the primary expected natural mitigation could be via continental scale "cleansing" over a sustained period: 10-20 missed generations x 30 years per generation = up to 600 years. That's a proper reset. Some environmental toxins like PFAS will however last much longer in the environment.

You seem to think nature has some sort of goal-directed activity. Why?

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