http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2013/12/02/3902972.htm

Monday, 2 December 2013
ABC

The sons of trained mouse fathers also had the altered gene expression in their sperm (Source: Christian Anthony/iStockphoto)
Related Stories
Genetics is so last century, Science Online, 01 Feb 2012
Ladder of life mysteries amaze, Science Online, 21 Oct 2009
How epigenetics is changing our fight with disease, Science Online, 02 Oct 2009
Lab mice trained to fear a particular smell can transfer the impulse to their unborn sons and grandsons through a mechanism in their sperm, a study reveals.

The research claims to provide evidence for the concept of animals “inheriting” a memory of their ancestors’ traumas, and responding as if they had lived the events themselves.

This pretty much blows me away …

That’s certainly unexpected.

Bubblecar said:

That’s certainly unexpected.

…i.e. the research results, not Dropbear being blown away.

haha. dna reproduction is subtly complex and people are surprised? odd

Would this be an example of Lamarckian evolution?

Well I hate to say “I told you so*”, but I have long thought that the certainty that acquired characteristics could not be inherited was not well founded.

• actually, that’s not true.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Would this be an example of Lamarckian evolution?

I know nothing about biology but it seems a bit like it… I have no idea how a learned response gets encoded into DNA though. Very weird

>I have no idea how a learned response gets encoded into DNA though

It doesn’t:

>The gene, inherited through the sperm of trained mice, had undergone no change to its DNA encoding, the team found.

But the gene did carry epigenetic marks that could alter its behaviour and cause it to be “expressed more” in descendants, says Dias.

This in turn caused a physical change in the brains of the trained mice, their sons and grandsons, who all had a larger glomerulus – a section in the olfactory (smell) unit of the brain.<

Bubblecar said:

But the gene did carry epigenetic marks that could alter its behaviour and cause it to be “expressed more” in descendants, says Dias.

This in turn caused a physical change in the brains of the trained mice, their sons and grandsons, who all had a larger glomerulus – a section in the olfactory (smell) unit of the brain.<

Does this suggest that DNA can critically assess and plan it’s response to the environment?

>Does this suggest that DNA can critically assess and plan it’s response to the environment?

No.

Bubblecar said:

>Does this suggest that DNA can critically assess and plan it’s response to the environment?

No.

A limited response to a complex question. I am not suggesting a cognitive assessment of the type the human mind is familiar with but rather a genetic reproduction system that adjusts future outlays of resources according to the sensory input a particular individual might experience.

I guess I had better google the shit out of “epigenetic” marker

In biology, and specifically genetics, epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene activity which are not caused by changes in the DNA sequence. Unlike simple genetics based on changes to the DNA sequence (the genotype), the changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype of epigenetics have other causes. The name epi- (Greek: επί- over, outside of, around) -genetics.

The term also refers to the changes themselves: functionally relevant changes to the genome that do not involve a change in the nucleotide sequence. Examples of mechanisms that produce such changes are DNA methylation and histone modification, each of which alters how genes are expressed without altering the underlying DNA sequence. Gene expression can be controlled through the action of repressor proteins that attach to silencer regions of the DNA. These epigenetic changes may last through cell divisions for the duration of the cell’s life, and may also last for multiple generations even though they do not involve changes in the underlying DNA sequence of the organism; instead, non-genetic factors cause the organism’s genes to behave (or “express themselves”) differently. (There are objections to the use of the term epigenetic to describe chemical modification of histone, since it remains unclear whether or not histone modifications are heritable.)

One example of an epigenetic change in eukaryotic biology is the process of cellular differentiation. During morphogenesis, totipotent stem cells become the various pluripotent cell lines of the embryo, which in turn become fully differentiated cells. In other words, as a single fertilized egg cell – the zygote – continues to divide, the resulting daughter cells change into all the different cell types in an organism, including neurons, muscle cells, epithelium, endothelium of blood vessels, etc., by activating some genes while inhibiting the expression of others.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

Riff-in-Thyme said:

Bubblecar said:

>Does this suggest that DNA can critically assess and plan it’s response to the environment?

No.

A limited response to a complex question. I am not suggesting a cognitive assessment of the type the human mind is familiar with but rather a genetic reproduction system that adjusts future outlays of resources according to the sensory input a particular individual might experience.

There’s no “critical assessing” or “planning” involved. It’s blind cause & effect.

Bubblecar said:

Riff-in-Thyme said:

Bubblecar said:

>Does this suggest that DNA can critically assess and plan it’s response to the environment?

No.

A limited response to a complex question. I am not suggesting a cognitive assessment of the type the human mind is familiar with but rather a genetic reproduction system that adjusts future outlays of resources according to the sensory input a particular individual might experience.

There’s no “critical assessing” or “planning” involved. It’s blind cause & effect.

The fact that the system allows for cause and effect to be employed in a proggressively more functional manner suggests that assessment and solution is the fundamental motor skill of organic complexity.

>assessment and solution

These terms are irrelevant to what’s going on. There really is no planning involved :)

And it’s being suggested that epigenetic factors are also responsible for people (and other critters) inheriting very unhelpful traits:

>Commenting on the findings, British geneticist Marcus Pembrey says they could be useful in the study of phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders.

“It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously,” he said in a statement issued by the Science Media Centre.

“I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach.”<

There’s no “critical assessing” or “planning” involved. It’s blind cause & effect.
—————————————————————————————

How do you prove such a thing?

Surely critical assessing may be as simple as, there is no food here lets try over there.

Not in English of course…

>Surely critical assessing may be as simple as, there is no food here lets try over there.

What does that have to do with the chemical processes involved in epigenetics?

Bubblecar said:

>assessment and solution

These terms are irrelevant to what’s going on. There really is no planning involved :)

In any individual organisms mechanics this may be apparent but on the macro-scale all organics we understand are related genetically down to bacteria that diverged between producing flora or fauna. As a unit, the system is pro actively critical of and responsive to the environment. I suppose this is where the panspermia question comes from, ie, is life a fundamental and inevitable result of mandelbrot logarithms that define the universe?

I remember seeing a doco on chimps with no fear of snakes being shown videos of other chimps’ responses to a rubber snake. I think this is the doco

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0109431

but the content is unavailable. Is there another way to find this online?

I’m almost certain that this outlines the findings

Monkeys are afraid of snakes. They are afraid of real snakes, rubber snakes, and garden hoses… if it’s snaky they don’t like it.

But scientists found that a baby monkey raised in isolation will play with a rubber snake without fear. Hmmm… so monkeys are not born afraid of snakes.

But then put an adult monkey in with that monkey and when the adult sees the rubber snake she goes nuts. And after the adult leaves the baby monkey is reliably afraid of snakes.

Okay so far… a learned fear of snakes similar to our own. Human babies don’t have many innate fears. A baby raised with a crib-full of snakes would probably not fear them, but many of us get that fear from somewhere along the way. Probably from adult reactions.

So they decided to see whether a baby monkey could learn snake-fear via video. They showed the monkey video of an adult on the left side of the screen freaking out with a rubber snake on the right side of the screen. And fearless baby monkeys watching the video became afraid of snakes.

But here’s the mind-blowing part…

They then showed the video with different things on the right side of the screen… so that the freak-out reaction appeared to be in response to a donut, or a rubber ball, or a stuffed bear… various things… and it doesn’t work.

It only works for snaky things!

So monkeys are born with an innate mechanism to fear snaky things, in specific, but that fear has to be triggered through a process. Without the predisposition to fear something the trigger doesn’t work. Without the trigger the innate predisposition doesn’t work.

And why is that? Because evolution operates with the tools on hand. It works through small changes, not big leaps. It would be arguably more efficient to have monkeys born fearing snakes but the instinct for learning to fear snaky things was easier… it required fewer steps. And if it works that jury-rigged way then there is no evolutionary pressure to “perfect” it.

(A baby monkey in the wild that never sees an adult is dead either way, with or without snakes. A baby monkey that never sees an adult freak-out over a snake is probably somewhere without many snakes.)

In a species where you will be raised by a mother it is more efficient to have an ability to learn from her experiences than to try to hardwire those experiences in the prenatal brain. Birds flying, kittens hunting, monkeys knowing what fruits are good… once you have parental involvement then you have a sort of culture and a lot of essential knowledge can be acquired after birth.

(Again, a baby without a mother is a goner in every scenario, so evolution treats having an adult role model as a given. It is as much a part of the creature’s natural life-cycle as pre-natal development of the brain.)

Kittens are not born with a book on hunting hard-wired in their heads. They are, however, born with a set of instincts for individual hunting related actions and behaviors and an instinct for learning more about hunting. Birds have flying instincts that are triggered by a parent. And so on. We have a language instinct but are not born knowing a language—we will learn whatever language culture hands us.

Innate anxieties that must be triggered by society is a fascinating concept. I think of racism that way. It is obviously both learned and instinctual. Racism toward people one can see are only distantly related to one’s own tribe is powerfully adaptive on the selfish-gene level. (Evolution is not pretty or good, it is merely what it is.) And everything we know about history and society suggests an instinct for learning clannish attitudes that is a lot more powerful than our instinct for learning trigonometry, but our innate preference for our tribe, our gene-pool, has to be activated by culture.

Very, very few things are all genetic or all environmental.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10021451775

>As a unit, the system is pro actively critical of and responsive to the environment.

…via cause & effect, not planning. Epigenetics potentially allows faster (short term) adaptation:

Evolution

Epigenetics can impact evolution when epigenetic changes are heritable. A sequestered germ line or Weismann barrier is specific to animals, and epigenetic inheritance is more common in plants and microbes. Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb have argued that these effects may require enhancements to the standard conceptual framework of the modern evolutionary synthesis. Other evolutionary biologists have incorporated epigenetic inheritance into population genetics models or are openly skeptical.

Two important ways in which epigenetic inheritance can be different from traditional genetic inheritance, with important consequences for evolution, are that rates of epimutation can be much faster than rates of mutation and the epimutations are more easily reversible. An epigenetically inherited element such as the PSI+ system can act as a “stop-gap”, good enough for short-term adaptation that allows the lineage to survive for long enough for mutation and/or recombination to genetically assimilate the adaptive phenotypic change. The existence of this possibility increases the evolvability of a species.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics#Molecular_basis_of_epigenetics

That’s interesting, Speedy.

Bubblecar said:

>As a unit, the system is pro actively critical of and responsive to the environment.

…via cause & effect, not planning. Epigenetics potentially allows faster (short term) adaptation:

I apologise for including an anthropogenic term to confuse things. However, if a fundamental mandelbrot logarithm generates two distinct systems for long term and short term adaptation then I would say that assessment and adaptation are built in to the logarithm that generates and enforces the nature of the system, signifying an analytically critical universal logarithmic mechanism.

>signifying an analytically critical universal logarithmic mechanism.

It’s the environment that sorts out which genotype is going to work and which isn’t, once the chemistry’s been done. Epigenetic changes represent another layer of chemical modification (distinct from genetic mutation), which may be useful to subsequent generations in the short term, or may be harmful, or neutral. We’re fortunate to live in a universe where all these things are possible :)

Bubblecar said:

We’re fortunate to live in a universe where all these things are possible :)

It is the assumption that this is simply a “fortune” and not fundamental to the nature of the universe that I am questioning. That there might be fortunate results as opposed to inevitable results seems a particularly anthropogenically based assumption.

>It is the assumption that this is simply a “fortune” and not fundamental to the nature of the universe that I am questioning.

It’s obviously fundamental to the nature of the universe that such fortune is possible :)

Bubblecar said:

>signifying an analytically critical universal logarithmic mechanism.

It’s the environment that sorts out which genotype is going to work and which isn’t, once the chemistry’s been done. Epigenetic changes represent another layer of chemical modification (distinct from genetic mutation), which may be useful to subsequent generations in the short term, or may be harmful, or neutral. We’re fortunate to live in a universe where all these things are possible :)

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe, the mechanism of ‘life’ cannot be separated from the mechanisms of the ‘environment’. It seems extremely dismissive at this point to suppose that life is an unnecessary but fortunate consequence of the observable. In my estimation, to percieve the mechanisms of the universe as organic only requires recognising that our perception of the continuity of time is limited and that cause and result has a more dynamic FoR than we are automatically aware of.

I believe we have more evidence to support life being a fundamental absolute of the universes devices than an abherrational side effect.

Riff-in-Thyme said:

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe, the mechanism of ‘life’ cannot be separated from the mechanisms of the ‘environment’. It seems extremely dismissive at this point to suppose that life is an unnecessary but fortunate consequence of the observable. In my estimation, to percieve the mechanisms of the universe as organic only requires recognising that our perception of the continuity of time is limited and that cause and result has a more dynamic FoR than we are automatically aware of.

Logarithms are arguably a necessity for multiplication of the adder, but other than that, what do they have to do with evolution?

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe,

Life is an exponent of the divisional multiplication of the purple monkey dishwater

Dropbear said:

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe,

Life is an exponent of the divisional multiplication of the purple monkey dishwater

Perxactly *strokes chin *

Dropbear said:

Life is an exponent of the divisional multiplication of the purple monkey dishwater

I read that as purple monkey dishwasher. Luckily I figured out that a purple monkey washing dishes mustn’t have anything to do with this thread and reread. Now makes sense.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Riff-in-Thyme said:

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe, the mechanism of ‘life’ cannot be separated from the mechanisms of the ‘environment’. It seems extremely dismissive at this point to suppose that life is an unnecessary but fortunate consequence of the observable. In my estimation, to percieve the mechanisms of the universe as organic only requires recognising that our perception of the continuity of time is limited and that cause and result has a more dynamic FoR than we are automatically aware of.

Logarithms are arguably a necessity for multiplication of the adder, but other than that, what do they have to do with evolution?

You will no doubt remember going into exams with tables of logarithms. We have evolved past that now.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Riff-in-Thyme said:

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe, the mechanism of ‘life’ cannot be separated from the mechanisms of the ‘environment’. It seems extremely dismissive at this point to suppose that life is an unnecessary but fortunate consequence of the observable. In my estimation, to percieve the mechanisms of the universe as organic only requires recognising that our perception of the continuity of time is limited and that cause and result has a more dynamic FoR than we are automatically aware of.

Logarithms are arguably a necessity for multiplication of the adder, but other than that, what do they have to do with evolution?

A mandelbrot logarithm represents fundamental indivisibles that define the limits of the universe. Life is a quantity of the universe and therefore must be ruled by any logarithm that the universe might be ruled by…..

Riff-in-Thyme said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Riff-in-Thyme said:

If life is a fundamental logarithm of the universe, the mechanism of ‘life’ cannot be separated from the mechanisms of the ‘environment’. It seems extremely dismissive at this point to suppose that life is an unnecessary but fortunate consequence of the observable. In my estimation, to percieve the mechanisms of the universe as organic only requires recognising that our perception of the continuity of time is limited and that cause and result has a more dynamic FoR than we are automatically aware of.

Logarithms are arguably a necessity for multiplication of the adder, but other than that, what do they have to do with evolution?

A mandelbrot logarithm represents fundamental indivisibles that define the limits of the universe. Life is a quantity of the universe and therefore must be ruled by any logarithm that the universe might be ruled by…..

It is only our anthropogenic perspective of time that demands that one be the result of the other, rather than there being a fundamental dynamic relationship between the two.

I think you might be meaning “algorithm” :)

It’s an anagram, Babblecur

dv said:

It’s an anagram, Babblecur

So it is.

Bubblecar said:

I think you might be meaning “algorithm” :)

Thank you. I believe you are correct.

>Okay so far… a learned fear of snakes similar to our own. Human babies don’t have many innate fears. A baby raised with a crib-full of snakes would probably not fear them, but many of us get that fear from somewhere along the way. Probably from adult reactions”

Starting with a generalizing mechanism that tends the capacity of wariness (even fear) of things that give hostile signals that historically tended to lash out, bite, and killed quite a few of your ancestors that then didn’t live to breed (following the event), but also leaving open the specifics of what exactly to be fearful of to experience or/and handed-down knowledge is more reliable than trying to encode the specifics into DNA. Remember also many of these things that bite dangerously are potential food, and as it happens many things have a dangerous bite when variously finding themselves potentially becoming a meal and respond so, again a generalizing mechanism. They, the potential meal, are also fine-tuning their reponses as they go. Half of them getting through is knowing what and likelihood that something else is not interested or minding its own business, even maintaining safe operating spaces (proximity, not just phsyical).

I’ve been watching our new dog get aquainted with my parents cat lately, the cat initially and still is tending to be quite hostile when we visit, the dog though (from the RSPCA) looks to have been raised around cats (probably from young) and has little interest in the cat. The cat has seen the dog maybe for times now but is reducing the hostility, sensing the dog is not much interested in it, in fact the dog is almost ‘friendly’ toward the cat. Given a bit of time I could see them drinking from the same milk bowl.

Watched a shingle back the other day disappear into some vegetation in the garden and come running out after what seemed like it bumped into something hostile, a further look found another sleepy lizard in there that had a barley grass prickle in its eye, it was grumpy as hell it seems. I removed the barley grass prickle so hopefully the fella is happier now.

Interesting thread by the way. These almost Lamarck revelations (don’t read too much into that, just teasing but still very interesting) I first started to wonder about maybe 10 years or more back, was reading about some experiments on mice or rats and down-regulation of zinc levels in offspring of parents fed a diet deficient in this element.

>Human babies don’t have many innate fears

In fact it wouldn’t be adaptive for human babies to be all fired up with innate fears off the bat, it wouldn’t be good for them at all, but they sure rely on their mums and dads etc to have had their fear-generalized capacities, the specifics fine-tuned as relevant to the environments they find themselves in. Also human babies tend to be somewhat premature in a way, development being such a long process and that fat head had to be able to exit the vaginal canal and bone structure etc.

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

Peak Warming Man said:

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

Others use suppositories.

Well, it also gives insight into instinctual behaviours.

poikilotherm said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

Others use suppositories.

Is that what Catholic priests call them?

Peak Warming Man said:

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

the standard view of evolution as I understand it is that learned experiences are NOT passed to later generations…

(given that my son does not know, when he is born, how to do to algebra, this seems reasonable. he does however have an inherrent fear of heights and burny things – the interesting thing is knowing why one is passed down, and not the other.)

ie..instinct vs learned experience.

I’d hate to see what knowledge is passed on to bogan kids. Which is better with Diet Coke, Jim Beam or Jack Daniels?

Divine Angel said:

I’d hate to see what knowledge is passed on to bogan kids. Which is better with Diet Coke, Jim Beam or Jack Daniels?

Every bogan knows cheaper is better!!!!!!

Dropbear said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

the standard view of evolution as I understand it is that learned experiences are NOT passed to later generations…

(given that my son does not know, when he is born, how to do to algebra, this seems reasonable. he does however have an inherrent fear of heights and burny things – the interesting thing is knowing why one is passed down, and not the other.)

ie..instinct vs learned experience.

Ummm, I thought that instinct was the result of passed on learnt experience which was part of the evolutionary process along with natural selection, but I’m happy to be corrected, it’s not my field.

poikilotherm said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

Others use suppositories.

A Dr prescribes suppositories for a patient and tells them to place one of them up their back passage every day, and report back. After a week the patient reported back that she placed them up her back passage, front passage, kitchen, lounge, and dineing room, and that they didn’t work, “I may have shoved them up my arse for all the good they did

Peak Warming Man said:

Dropbear said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Without delving too deeply into what makes this research special I would have thought that passing on learned experiences was the basis for evolution, nothing new?

the standard view of evolution as I understand it is that learned experiences are NOT passed to later generations…

(given that my son does not know, when he is born, how to do to algebra, this seems reasonable. he does however have an inherrent fear of heights and burny things – the interesting thing is knowing why one is passed down, and not the other.)

ie..instinct vs learned experience.

Ummm, I thought that instinct was the result of passed on learnt experience which was part of the evolutionary process along with natural selection, but I’m happy to be corrected, it’s not my field.

Instinct is what you’re born with… not what you learn…

ie: the dive reflex.. all babies have it, for a certain period of their development..

I assume (I am not an evolutionary biologist) that this is the result of coding in our DNA.

What is being described here is something that is operating with a much different mechanism.

>>Instinct is what you’re born with

Yes and it is a collection of learnt experiences of your antecedents, no?

Peak Warming Man said:

>>Instinct is what you’re born with

Yes and it is a collection of learnt experiences of your antecedents, no?

That’s what the research is trying to find out.

I’m sure there are instincts that natural selection can’t explain but none off the top of my head yet.

Peak Warming Man said:

>>Instinct is what you’re born with

Yes and it is a collection of learnt experiences of your antecedents, no?

Well like I said, we pass on certain ‘low level stuff’ – stuff ‘hard wired’.. we don’t pass on higher learning or experiences.

but yeh, im talking out of my arse here.. i am no biologist

Peak Warming Man said:

I’m sure there are instincts that natural selection can’t explain but none off the top of my head yet.

some instincts are no doubt left overs from a more primitive form of life – ie the dive reflex serves no useful purpose to a human, but it probably does to one of our distant ancestors.

Peak Warming Man said:

I’m sure there are instincts that natural selection can’t explain but none off the top of my head yet.

And then there’s Wookie.

It will be interesting to see where this goes, in terms of human extrapolation.

It is very interesting research

seeing how many chemicals, compounds etc are in the human body

and how many chemicals and compounds there are in nature

what kinds of other information can be transferred by genes?

I hope a team can widen the research to a people group of humans and see what the findings are.

Although in the examples of therapeutic potentials listed above or hinted at the main aim would be for anxiety disorders at a guess.

CrazyNeutrino said:

what kinds of other information can be transferred by genes?

Your mum was great in the 80’s!

I meant to say a special sub group of humans!

Riff-in-Thyme said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

what kinds of other information can be transferred by genes?

Your mum was great in the 80’s!

He looked better with the make up on.

I find this almost as hard to believe as those stories about heart transplant patients having skills and memories from the donor.

Skeptic Pete said:

I find this almost as hard to believe as those stories about heart transplant patients having skills and memories from the donor.

I don’t in this instance. There was some research that understood that a person who experienced an illness in their lifetime passes of some level of change genetically.

Experiences change the chemistry of an unborn child’s brain chemistry and therefore this all seems rather plausible for changes in essentially plastine brains.

ratty one said:

Riff-in-Thyme said:

CrazyNeutrino said:

what kinds of other information can be transferred by genes?

Your mum was great in the 80’s!

He looked better with the make up on.

Yes, he does look better with makeup on

and for someone who has had sex with over 2000 women

he certainly knows all about genes

CrazyNeutrino said:

ratty one said:

Riff-in-Thyme said:

Your mum was great in the 80’s!

He looked better with the make up on.

Yes, he does look better with makeup on

and for someone who has had sex with over 2000 women

he certainly knows all about genes

Don’t trash droppy’s thread!

ok Ill behave

CrazyNeutrino said:

ok Ill behave

:-)