Can you inherit experiences?
Inside the weird world of epigenetics
"Experiments have shown, for example, that the experiences of a parent might lead to molecular changes that aren't encoded in DNA but can still be passed down to children, affecting the health and behavior of future generations.
These findings fall within a field known as epigenetics — and research in this area has turned up a few tantalizing results. Perhaps most famously, a recent study appeared to show that mice can inherit experiences of fear from their grandfathers — something traditional genetics would have suggested is impossible.
"The ramifications in terms of human health are enormous," says Sarah Kimmins, an epigenetics and reproductive biology researcher at McGill University. "What you're doing and how you’re living your life is going to have consequences not just for your child but for your grandchildren."
By the middle of the 20th century, scientists began realizing that DNA sequences weren't the only things telling genes what to do. Some instructions were also coming from the epigenome — basically a collection of other chemical markers and signals that interact with DNA and influence its activity.
Scientists have discovered that these chemical markers can also be affected by the outside environment. One good example involves bees. The difference between a queen and worker honeybee isn't their DNA sequences. Instead, larvae that end up becoming queens are fed more of a food called royal jelly, which contains ingredients that seem to regulate certain genes through epigenetic markers. In a similar fashion, scientists have found that some dietary choices in humans seem to turn cancer-related genes on or off.
Over the past decade, some scientists have suggested that epigenetic signals from the environment can be passed on from one generation to the next.
If so, that would be a big departure from what scientists had previously believed. Researchers had long known that the environment in the womb could alter fetal development. And they also knew that environmental factors, like radiation, could directly alter DNA that then got passed down. But environmental effects that only changed the epigenome, and not DNA itself, weren't thought to be heritable. (Scientists had thought that these epigenetic markers were reset with every new generation.)
Epigenetic inheritance is an extra layer suggesting that someone's experiences may affect how his or her children and grandchildren use their genes. That clashes with everything that has been understood about inheritance since Darwin and Mendel.
1) Grandparents might be able to pass on their experiences to grandkids: Some epidemiological studies that track health over several generations seem to suggest that the experiences of grandparents can somehow get passed down at least two generations, to grandkids. And this inheritance doesn't appear to be due to genetic mutations — but rather something else.
2) Animals might pass experiences on for two generations — and maybe through epigenetic changes: Some interesting recent animal studies include a paper published in December 2013 (by Sarah Kimmins and colleagues), showing that male lab mice fed a diet low in folate had different epigenetic markers on DNA in their sperm, and had babies with more birth defects.
Perhaps the most intriguing animal paper so far is a study published online in the winter of 2013 that appeared to show that fear memories can be inherited. Researchers from Emory University trained male mice to associate an odor with an electrical shock, so that they would get startled simply by smelling the odor by itself. Surprisingly, the scientists found that the next two generations of mice also got startled by the smell.
3) Childhood experiences might affect adult health — possibly through epigenetic changes:One key study showed that baby rats fostered by mothers who provided less care have epigenetic changes on a gene related to stress. Child abuse in people has been correlated with similar epigenetic changes, too. Name a health condition — cancer, diabetes, schizophrenia — and there's a decent chance that someone's found some kind of correlation to an epigenetic marker.
The big controversy is whether these epigenetic markers are actually being passed down through multiple generations. This idea is known as transgenerational epigenetics. And the idea is still fairly young and not fully sketched out." VOX
Numbers 14:18
Is this how this "punishment" down to the 3rd or 4th generation happens? Is it that we are a delicately wired machine, & when we deviate from God's design, we fall victim to our--& our ancestor's ways-- the repercussions of sin felt down through generational history? So the Bible is right again....
