Does Crime Leave a Genetic Trace? 160
gallifreyan99 writes "Scientists have spent decades trying to understand and fix social problems like violence and alcoholism, usually focusing on the poor and disadvantaged. But now a small band of researchers is claiming that biology plays a vitally important role — because trauma can change you at a genetic level that gets passed on to kids, grandkids, and perhaps even beyond."
Part of the research involved testing the effect of stress on the genetics of mice. A number of mice were subjected to stressful situations and then allowed to raise their children. The children, when later subjected to stress, were more vulnerable to it than normal mice (for example, they would stop struggling in a potentially fatal situation earlier than 'happy' mice). This was expected. What's interesting is that when those children were later bred with normal mice, and that third generation was raised by normal mice (so that parental neglect wasn't a factor), they still showed the same vulnerability to stress. A subsequent generation showed the same.
Lamarck Vindicated? (Score:4, Interesting)
Does this mean Lamarckian evolution is partially correct after all?
Curious (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd be curious to see how many generations will exhibit this characteristic, of course using the initial pre-stressed generation as the baseline for what normal behavior would be considered.
I always find it interesting when science proves something from ancient verbally-passed records, particularly when it's something which couldn't possibly* be scientifically concluded as truth in ancient days. Specific to this case, I believe the Bible says something like "your sins will be visited upon your children and your children's children for seven generations" or some such thing. Ignoring the biblical propensity to refer to everything in 'sevens', it'd be interesting to see if there's correlation.
* per our current understanding of ancients and their scientific capabilities
I'm posting AC, but I have a low UID (Score:5, Interesting)
The reasons should be plainly apparent:
My family was in no way disadvantaged. My father came from a family of modest means, but he was raised in a comfortable home in the country that his father built himself.
My father was a raging alcoholic, violently and sexually abusive to me, verbally abusive to my mother, sexually abusive to my sister.
But he was a good provider. He was a career military officer who retired at thirty, and served honorably in vietnam.
When I was a boy I was brutally bullied by my classmates. I don't know what I did to bring that on, but it was everything I could do to survive elementary school. Why didn't the teachers or the principal intervene when I was being beaten?
The result now is that while I am not an alcoholic, I surely would be if I ever touched alcohol. That becomes plainly apparent to me if I ever do get drunk so I choose not to drink.
I am fucked up beyond all repair. I've spent a lot of time in psychiatric hospitals.
I have a degree and am a good coder, but it is very difficult to provide for myself. I do my best to do right by others, but I myself am poor and disadvantaged. If I can get a job at all I earn more than 100K, but it is very difficult for me to get a job that I can tolerate.
Re:Lamarck Vindicated? (Score:5, Interesting)
Ehhhhh...I wouldn't go that far. Lamarkianism relies on a feedback mechanism to pump info back into genes, which is far more complicated that natural selection, where variation introduces info into genes, then the less-well-adapted genes survive less well and are replaced in subsequent generations by omission.
This is probably more related to epigenetics, where certain chunks of DNA are coated to stop their effect, and this can be responsive to the environment as well as passed down to children.
Also the exact causal relationships, if any, between stress, abdominal belly fat deposition (in the gut), and things like heart disease and insulin resistance, and even bacterial fauna population differences is also a hot area of research, and much of thatccan be passed on via non-DNA methods.
The people who wrote the Bible weren't idiots (Score:2, Interesting)
Doubtful (Score:5, Interesting)
I think there is some huge motivation on the part of the research here to explain why certain segments of the population remain in a loop of poverty and violence. I think social factors can adequately explain the problems we see. Perhaps there is a genetic component as well to why some groups do better than others, but research of that kind routinely gets the authors in trouble. Here we can have a quasi -genetic predisposition explanation that does away with the shame of having bad genes and suggests that it is society’s fault for not preventing the stressors in earlier generations that lead current generations to underperform.
What is a little strange is the implication that the changes to the epigenome stay permanently, of course only if they are negative changes.
we're already there: genetic testing of In Vitro.. (Score:4, Interesting)