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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

A pop science article talking about how "a researcher in the growing field of epigenetics and the intergenerational effects of trauma" found ... intergeneration effects of trauma kind of sets of my https://xkcd.com/882/ alarm.

ETA: especially considering this theory in general has been massively disproven twice (as Lamarck-ism and Lysenko-ism).

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While I enjoy calling epigenetics "Lamarck's Revenge", it's not correct, and I'm well aware of that (I'd even call it part of the joke, at least for myself). Lamarck was wrong about the dominant way in which traits are passed down, full stop, and no future discoveries are going to change that. Epigenetics is more limited, more nuanced, and also, to some extent, now inevitable that it's doing something.

Remember, the genetics you learned in school were just scratching the surface of what was known even then, and the science has been progressing by leaps and bounds since then. Everywhere they look there's another complicated mechanism doing complicated things for complicated reasons. It's terrible and awesome, in the original meanings of those terms.

It sounds like their research is a little more robust than that:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18037011

It's not like Lamarck or Lysenko proposed specific persistent markers on DNA, the failure of their ideas doesn't do a lot to discredit the possibility of epigenetic effects.

You really can't discount the study of epigenetics as a modern field, simply because Lamarck and Lysenko were incorrect over a century ago.

I wouldn't discount it. But the more a published scientific finding spins a narrative that would confirm people's existing sensitivities, the more evidence it takes for me to be convinced it is true. Because of all false scientific findings (which most are: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/), the ones that are most likely to virally propagate despite being false are the ones that people want to be true.

So the more I can imagine someone nodding their head and saying "yeah, that totally makes sense," the more I am skeptical of the study until I see some pretty solid evidence.

(I haven't looked at the evidence for this at all, so have no opinion on it).

No, but I definitely can discount one study because two other people that claimed similar things were proven wrong (and Lysenko was less than a century ago). Although I can't tell in this case whether they're claiming anything other than hormone levels in the mother during pregnancy might impact development (which is another reason I'm extremely skeptical of any stronger claims made in the article)

There was a radiolab episode awhile ago about a study in Sweden. They had records going back centuries, of family trees and each years harvest. They found that grandchildren of people who starved at the age of 9 had significantly better life outcomes.

http://www.radiolab.org/story/251885-you-are-what-your-grand...

Indeed, there seems a casual assumption in some pop accounts and discussions that such 'inherited stress' must be bad, a continuation of the ancestral tragedy. In fact some evidence, like that Swedish data, suggests the opposite can also be true.

That sounds like a textbook case of p-value hacking and hypothesis fishing. Is there a solid statistical analysis on the space of hypotheses considered and the size of effects measured?

Fascinating. Also entirely consistent with genetic determinism by the usual natural selection story - 9 year olds who survive starvation have bad-ass genes, etc.

Kids were not dying of starvation, just malnourished. And it fits with the epigenetic theory because 9 years old is when your sex cells form.

If it was just selection, the effect wouldn't be as strong, and should happen regardless what age the starvation happens.

Dying vs. merely damaged is a red herring. Interesting fact re: 9 yo => making eggs/sperm - good comment overall. "Effect wouldn't be as strong" why?

Re: 'regardless of age': you can't rule out genes that influence near-starvation thrive/fail differentially at young vs teen ages. Nevertheless I agree that this is suggestive evidence for "it's not just regular genetics". Good analysis if it indeed applies to this case!

Yeah, this was the first thing that came to my mind, but I couldn't remember where I read this (I thought it was posted on HN recently), but I guess I heard it on Radiolab. I also found a more recent study about the same phenomenon:

http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2014/07/17/effects-of...

This is a variant of 'I don't understand [something]...therefore I must be right'.

If you don't like pop science here is her research - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Yehuda%20R[Author]&...

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