Of course, a lot of such studies turn out to be not reproducible. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes a lot of sense to pass some of our life experiences on to our offspring at the biological level, without waiting a few thousand years for natural selection to maybe do it.
Evolution doesn't work the way they taught you in high school.
If this is real, it's astonishing that nobody has discovered it before, any time in the last hundred years or so. The lack of discovery would have to be attributed to the immense power of scientific dogma.
I wonder if viral immunity is passed to offspring. It makes overwhelming sense that it should be.
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John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc
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2010 and 2013 *is* within the last 100 years. :) Further it's 'only' about 50 years ago that the structure of DNA has been found, and the enthusiasm was apparently so overwhelming that people didn't bother to look any further for a while. Until now, apparently.
According to what I know about it, that would be due to some genes being activated (switched on) that would produce specific antibodies. At least, if you'd continuing reasoning along this path of DNA, mRNA. But I don't think it's happening that way.
Fact is, that mothers give their babies immunity against viral diseases that they have experienced. That's why it's not clever to immunize girls against measles, because then in a later stage they will not be able to produce the antibodies needed to protect their newborn babies against the measles. (Expect some 'scientifically based' opposition however from Bill Sloman. :)
This is only the tip of the iceberg. Humans are 10% human material and 90% microbes. After born, a baby is subjected to the microbes of father, relatives etc and all of that does make changes in the baby. Don't believe me. Stick around for a few more years and see what falls out. Microbes are involved in so much of our lives and we pay very little attention to it.
90% or so of ulcers come from infection and many times from a "typhoid mary" mate. This was unknown for most of history. Your skin is crawling with microbes. Shake hands and get a different dose. There are around seven or so different colonies of bacterial in different people's guts. So kiss and get their gut colony introduced to your gut colony and visa versa.
The bigger picture is being suppressed for some very interesting reasons.
Translation: gene expression is variable, regardless of gene character, and some aspects of expression are inheritable. Evolution works just as we thought, but there's other aspects of inheritance than genetic (epigenome being one, and vast wealth being another).
Not at all astonishing; it takes genetic testing to find out anything in less than a human generation (and it takes a detailed life history beyond the usual records on test animals, even in little short-lived critters).
This is clearly a discovery, not a lack of discovery. The discovery is due to scientific investigation.
More important, DNA is a big part of inheritance, BUT NOT ALL. It never WAS considered the totality of inheritance. You need a complete ovum, a CELL, not just a nucleus, to propogate ribosomes and cell membranes and other organelles. Any suggestion that DNA alone is what defines a living being, is Sunday-supplement simplification, not science.
What *do* you know about it? I don't think anti-bodies are made by "switching on" genes. It is more like shuffling a deck of gene cards and assembling them in different orders.
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Waaaaht??? Vaccinations do not prevent antibodies!!! They result in your body *making* antibodies!!! God! Do you ever try to fact check yourself? Obviously not if you consider 'scientifically based' opposition to be a bad thing.
I think I going to get an early start on the Easter holidays and give up discussions with you for Lent.
Genetically speaking. Mass-wise, most of us is human and the microbes in ou r guts are a minor component.
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More since we've been able to work exactly what microbes live in our guts, and identify them reliably - which depends on sequencing a great deal of ge netic material. Before we cloud do that we couldn't culture single strains of bacteria from our guts - we didn't have culture media that would keep th em alive - so the traditional methods of looking at bacteria didn't work.
Helicobacter pylori was identified as as the cause of stomach ulcers in 198
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About half of us carry it in our stomachs, so "typhoid Mary" isn't an appro priate analogy.
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It doesn't look as if it being suppressed to me. Even idiots like Jamie hav e taken the idea on board (though he doesn't understand it particularly wel l).
It's not - on the face of it - a particularly useful bit of information to have.
In the 1950's my aunt got vitamin B deficiencies because her doctor gave he r a particularly broad-spectrum antibiotic that cleaned out her gut bacteri a. Her husband (who was then well on his way to becoming a D.Sc. based on h is studies of metabolism and nutrition, first in the ruminant and later in the human) woke up to what was going on and got her well again with a broad
-spectrum B-vitamin supplement and was rather rude about human doctors not knowing what was well-known to vets at the time.
The bacterial population in the normal gut is kept diverse by a bunch of ba cteriophages (viruses that exploit bacteria) and I don't know that anybody has yet worked out a way to modify or exploit that mechanism.
We didn't know about DNA as mechanism for transfering heritable information until Watson and Crick in 1953, so that idea hasn't been around for 100 ye ars yet.
The idea of genes is rather older - Gregor Mendel had worked it out in 1865 , but his worked wasn't rediscovered until about 1900, by people who had mo re or less repeated his experiments - but nobody had a clue what they were and why they worked the way they did.
Watson and Crick did point out that the DNA structure did provide a plausib le mechanism for transferring heritable information, but it took about anot her decade to nail down their speculation.
It took quite a lot longer for us to know enough to be able to separate out epigenetic effects, but by the time we'd worked out that identical twins r eally were identical (and capable of tolerating grafts from one to the othe r) we also knew that they weren't entirely identical.
on until Watson and Crick in 1953, so that idea hasn't been around for 100 years yet.
65, but his worked wasn't rediscovered until about 1900, by people who had more or less repeated his experiments - but nobody had a clue what they wer e and why they worked the way they did.
There hasn't really been a century-long period without changes in understan ding. The female-descent-only information in mitochondrial DNA doesn't fit the Mendelian inheritance pattern, for instance (and that's been a research top ic since the '80s).
More important, Lamarck never observed any inheritance-of-acquired-traits, he doesn't deserve credit for any others' discoveries. He was Joe Stalin' s favorite agronomist during the turbulent collectivization of agriculture (by some accounts, 35 million died of various causes during that period, mainly by complications due to starvation). I'd hate to give him credit for ANY THING, but certainly not for science.
Lamarck-ism was just a way to suck up to a Stalin protegee.
You're confusing Lamarck with Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko was an early example of a widespread modern disease, namely stifling of scientific disagreement by an unscrupulous 'scientific' elite with too much control over the government.
Hmmmm..well..the only question you need to be concerned with is what the heck was going in your parents' lives at the time of your conception that had them so confused. I'm not reading any of those sweeping generalities in the article.
I haven't heard that anti-vaccination argument before. It has even less scientific basis than the usual "the mercury in the vaccinations causes autism" or "it's a conspiracy between the drug companies and the government to steal our money and/or drug us into docility". But they say a change is as good as a rest.
(Here's a tip for you - vaccines work by triggering the body's immune response to produce antibodies for the disease.)
To be even more accurate, for every human cell, you have approximately
10 bacteria and archaea in or on you. Their combined weight is a good deal less than the combined weight of your human cells, because the human cells are much bigger. And their combined DNA is a good deal less than 90% of your "total" DNA, because human cells contain much more DNA than bacterial or archaeal cells.
And then there are viruses - we have pretty much no idea how many different types of virus, and how many of each of those, that people carry around normally. We know only about a very small proportion of viruses with clear symptomatic effects. So any guesses as to the proportion of viral DNA to human DNA in the average person would be pure guesswork.
(There are also fungi, and lots of small animals in and on your body, but these usually play a much smaller role - and as a percent of the cells or DNA, they are negligible.)
But the principle - that the microbe flora and fauna have significant and complex health effects - is certainly true. It is an area of intensive research, but we are still mostly at the stage of learning how much we don't know.
The challenge for doctors is to keep up with the current state of medical knowledge. This is especially true for general practitioners.
I'm glad I had finished my coffee before reading that one!
If this relates to the previous comment, then perhaps we should be glad that those pictures are being suppressed...
Studies start out being non-reproducible as scientists discover things by accident, spot possible coincidences, or just try out new ideas. Then as the idea gets more concrete and interesting, they move towards more repeatable experiments and studies. This is part of how science works.
This is why we have evolved a range of features to do /exactly/ that. You might be familiar with some of them already - parents (and other members of the species) teaching their children is the most important method in mammals. Teaching your kids not to drink out of the toilet makes a far bigger difference to avoiding disease than any passed-on antibodies or immunity.
Other key methods for mammals include mother's milk (containing antibodies), and of course everything going on in the womb (more antibodies, hormones, etc., as well as non-nuclear DNA and other bits and pieces inside the egg cell).
Given that scientists have been figuring out more and more details of evolution on a continuous basis since before Darwin's time, and with increasing speed in recent years due to vastly improved equipment, I think it is perfectly reasonable to say that evolution is not as simple as we learned in high school.
People /have/ thought of this before - it is not a completely new idea. But it is still at the stage of being an idea, with vague theories about the mechanisms - articles like this are to gain publicity and hopefully funding for more research.
And it is not as dramatic an idea as you think. The basic idea of your genes being roughly a half-and-half mix of your parents genes, with the odd mutation thrown in, still stands strong - this is the main mechanism for inherited characteristics that forms the backbone of evolution. What has changed in the decades since DNA was discovered is that we are learning about a wider range of additional effects - more complex ways of swapping genes, more ways of controlling the activation of genes, more variation in the genes within a single organism, more characteristics and features that have sources other than genes, and so on.
I don't think anyone else was under the impression that evolution and genetics is a closed book - that Darwin (or possibly Watson and Crick) found the answer, and no one else need bother looking any further.
Just because /you/ are learning about this for the first time, does not mean that it is because "scientific dogma" has stopped progress.
Some immunity /is/ passed on, at least temporarily, in the womb and the mother's milk.
It is quite possible that a certain amount of viral immunity is passed on in different ways - as you are beginning to learn, there are a good many ways in which characteristics are passed on between generations (and amongst people). There is no reason to suppose we have figured out all such methods, or all the details of the methods we currently know about.
And given that we have such a tiny overview of the viruses in our bodies, we currently have very little way of knowing if and how much viral immunity is passed on.
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