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Acquired Characteristics May Be Inheritable
A story from a week or so back in Technology Review describes research coming to the surprising conclusion that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck may have been right — that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring, at least in rodents. Lamarck's ideas have been controversial for 200 years, and dismissed in mainstream scientific thinking for nearly that long. "In Feig's study, mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were raised in an enriched environment — given toys, exercise, and social interaction — for two weeks during adolescence. The animals' memory improved... The mice were then returned to normal conditions, where they grew up and had offspring. This next generation of mice also had better memory, despite having the genetic defect and never having been exposed to the enriched environment."
something that explains religion...
It could be one day possible to create a kind of device that harmonizes human beings early on in childhood development, increasing their awareness and understandings.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Of course. The brain is quite plastic at such an early stage of development. This is why people that lose vision have great hearing and smelling, etc. My question is whether these effects can occur when the brain isn't the problematic organ.
In any case, the problem is making sure that we can identify these problems while there's still time to nurture someone to overcome it. The brain is far more plastic in early stages of life than it is in older ones.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
Lamarck is one of those guys who's name is generally synonymous with bad science (he's about as villified as Darwin is deified). I'm actually a bit (pleasantly) surprised that someone would invest the time into this sort of study.
That being said, the article is rather short in one important area: a suggested mechanism for this sort of inheritance. Without that, it's bound to be mired in controversy for some time.
Here's the actual article.
But I'm interested in how they think the trait for intelligence gets passed on. It might be important to note what causes the genetic defect. It could be a change in a site that is actively expressed, or it could be a change in whether the area of the chromosome responsible for the brain function is activated. There are still lots of gaps in our knowledge in what causes gene expression because it's based upon more than just start and stop codons, but also on the structure of the molecule. It could be possible that environmental factors changed some physical element of the gene causing it to be expressed again, though to me that sounds almost as much of a soft sci-fi nightmare as "genetic memory." Perhaps someone who is a geneticist can shed some light on possible vectors for this hereditary intelligence.
We're just learning that Histone/DNA modifications can be inherited.
Histones (the spools around which DNA is stored) tell when the DNA source code should be 'active' vs 'inactive'. And these histones have a huge data space in the form of possible modifications (methylation, acetylation, etc.).
When DNA is replicated, these histones too are replicated at the same time. And they seem to be replicated in a semiconserved manner similar to DNA (half go to 'old' strand, half go to 'new' strand). And that there is a whole series of touring-like proteins that can 'read' 'write' or 'erase' these modifications.
If these modifications are made during an organism's life, they can be inherited by offspring.
Not only is the code being copied, but the 'marks' that tell which/when/where to read the code at any given time/condition too can be passed down. And that these marks can be written in real time rather than waiting for mutations in the code itself.
There was a recent study that XO females who inherited the X from their father had markedly different dispositions than those who inherited the X from their mother. DNA modification that is unique to how the male or female deal with their own X chromosome could be being passed down to offspring.
My first thought is that it could be a meme. Somehow, the environment caused mice acquire a (subtle) behavior which their offspring acquired (mice can learn by observation) and stimulated their brains resulting in better memory...
Can anyone else comment?
Who's to say the enrichment caused this, lacking a control whose parents were NOT raised in an enriched environment? And if they did do a control (RTFA, yeah right), the explanation could simply be that the enriched environment resulted in a more healthy womb that the offspring grew in. Parents pass a lot more than just DNA to their offspring.
I'm sorry, so the offspring of these mice stayed with the general population and their parents?
Couldn't this be an argument for nurture? Heck, just competing with other mice.
Like the youngest learning to eat first in some families...
I'm not convinced that there is anything even remotely of interest here.
I always thought my neck was too short, watch me and my progeny evolve bitches!
The article says nothing about DNA "modifications."
When a mommy mouse makes a baby mouse, the baby mouse depends on:
1. The DNA it gets from the mom and dad mice.
2. The chemical/hormonal environment during development in the womb.
The article says point 2 is more important than expected (although there is a lot of folk wisdom that implies it, so it may be more that scientists dismissed/ignored/couldn't test a fairly obvious hypothesis.)
No DNA modification/Lamarkian inheritance is going on: beyond raw DNA, happy mommy mice give birth to happy baby mice, etc.
Genetics is a rather young science. We have made huge gains since Watson and Crick, but we really don't understand what the bulk of our DNA does.
...that these mice used practiced good parenting.
THL phish sticks
Actually, it was Newsweek, a month ago. There was even a follow-up online-only piece on the same experiment as TFA that was out one day earlier.
To comment on the topic at hand, though, it's no surprise that there are elements beyond genetics that contribute to evolutionary success. Embryology is extraordinarily complicated and there's plenty of room in there for the environment supplied by the mother to affect the form of the child, especially in species that gestate internally as long as most mammals do.
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Females have all the eggs made before they're born, so how could the genetic material in them be affect by the conditions that the mother grew up in? Sperm DNA seems like it could be modified by the father according to living conditions, but it seems odd to think that environmental information in the brain would be passed down to the testes and such... It seems more plausible to think it's just the mice had a better mother.
Really, this is hardly a surprising result. There are many possible mechanisms that suggest themselves, operating either on the embryo or on the newborn - parents who are more intelligent are likely to be able to pass on more of what they've learned and/or provide a "richer" environment for their offspring, even if we're only talking about mice. The mammalian brain is remarkably plastic.
The real problem for the Lamarckian paradigm is that once you've optimized the environment, socialization, and gene expression for the animals in question, it's hard to propose a mechanism for making more radical changes through "acquired characteristics" - and in fact no such changes have been observed. This study does not change that fact.
The original article sounds to me to be altogether too credulous and sensationalistic.
Freud Confirms the Theory of Genetic Memory!
As it so happens, all of those men that wanted to sleep with their mothers were simply recalling the last memory inherited from their fathers' just prior to conception.
Coming up: President Bush recollects his vine-swinging days. Story at 11.
"If the findings can be conveyed to human, it means that girls' education is important not just to their generation but to the next one," says Moshe Szyf of McGill University, in Montreal, who was not involved in the research.
It strikes me that this is a stunningly redundant observation -- that a girl's education has an effect on her offspring. Move the mother to France and teach her French, and it doesn't require complex genetics to unravel why her offspring also speak French.
Doh, why didn't someone tell me that "inheritable" means "heritable"?
...they cut off a mouse's leg and the offspring are shown to walk funny.
-- thinkyhead software and media
he was right-on Lamarck...
That's what a good deal of what "instincts" are better called. Such behaviors occur sometimes in animals that do not learn from their parents or other functioning adults. In order for these to exist, they had to have been incorporated genetically. Since the species did not exist at some time in the past, the species and the behavior had to have evolved concurrently. Surgical excision of the part of the brain known to relate to a behavior disrupts the behavior. If there were no pathway for acquired behaviors to be passed along genetically we'd all still be oozing around in a pool of slime mold. This is yet another 'science' article about a minor aspect of a known phenomenon, written in such a way as to make it seem this recent contribution discovered and/or explains it. If this occurs in 9 out of 10 articles on /. it's because that's how often it occurs in what now passes as science writing in the media.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
the histones within the reproductive cells to be modified though?
I can totally picture how this could happen for conventional non-reproductive cell division, but that generally doesn't affect at all offsprings.
I'm not saying that you're wrong, I'm just really wondering how that's happening.
The Raven
I'm not a biologist, but this raises my Occam's razorblade.
Why wouldn't the simplest explanation be that the genetic engineering didn't "take" across the generations, ie that the "normal" characteristics reasserted themselves in the offspring due to standard DNA redundancy mechanisms? Another simple explanation would be that the researchers didn't fully understand just what exactly their genetic engineering actually accomplished.
It's one thing to observe an improvement from a normal baseline, it's another to observe a reversion to the normal baseline from an artificially induced abnormality.
In Soviet Russia, Lamarckism as interpreted by Lysenko in agriculture, was the state mandated approach and genetics was essentially outlawed until the 1960s. Geneticists were fired from jobs, sent to work camps, prison or just executed.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
The inheritance mechanism is interesting but for practical purposes is not necessary to understand to start applying this knowledge. This holds great promise for those who suffer from neurological disorders where there appears to be both a genetic and environmental component to the phenotype (eg. bipolar). An equivalent "enriched" environment (eg. improved socio-economic conditions, tailored primary education programmes, etc. rather than say institutionalisation) might help families with a history of these disorders reduce the severity of symptoms over successive generations.
rnadom txet for a sngrutaie
or more that external factors could have influenced this experiment. I strongly suggest taking it with a grain of salt.
It is not possible to prove that acquired characteristics are never inherited. For the same reason we can never prove that fairies do not exist. All we can say is that no sightings of fairies have ever been confirmed and that such alleged photographs of them as have been produced are palpable fakes.
The article does seem to be a bit of stretch, especially ending with "However, he cautions, there is no direct evidence of this, and no specific evidence that the behaviors are transmitted through epigenetic mechanisms."
We are becoming the Aldenata!
This might be something like what zappepcs was remembering. I dimly recall reading similar research several years ago -- basically, the findings are that babies appear to be more aware of or interested in snake and spider shapes, but do not fear them until they've seen an adult express fear at them. A choice excerpt (emphasis mine):
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I really hope it's not the case that results can be rejected due to the lack of a mechanism to explain them.
Darwin had no mechanism to back his theory of 'origin of species by natural selection'. The mechanisms people had theorized at the time were not really compatible with Darwin's ideas. It wasn't till Mendel's work was appreciated that people had a viable mechanism for the inheritance that fit with Darwin's evolutionary theory.
This has been known for quite a while. However, only fairly little information can be transmitted this way, and that information lives on a DNA substrate.
Think of the DNA as a printed book, and the "acquired characteristics" are like little bookmarks you leave in the book: they can't alter the text, but they can direct you more quickly to different parts and change your reading experience.
It's been known for at least a few decades that breast milk carries "trainer" cells for a child's immune system. This makes sense evolution-wise: if the offspring can borrow "knowledge" from the parent, then it can help the offspring without waiting several generations for such ability to evolve genetically. The ability to use beneficial shortcuts will be passed on more often.
Table-ized A.I.
I am not saying this is bad science, or that they didn't find the results they did, just that the study belongs to a category where you likely need independent confirmation before accepting theur claim.
Why? Well, in behavioral studies it is notoriously difficult have repeatable results, due to small test series and the high sensitivity of the parameters themselves, which typically are measured on very crude scales.
It is a bit like judging contestants in chamber music in a steel plant. You need an awful lot of judges and repeated plays in order to discern the virtuosos. Bad analogy, but I hope you get the point.
What a perfect study. You take some rats. Make them retarded. Then help make them better again. Then let them have offspring. When the offspring come out normal, you come to the conclusion that it is because of the retarded parents learning to be unretarded. This really makes a whole lot of sense. Great use of millions of dollars of research money. Good thing the government is going to spend an additional 700 quadrillion dollars (of YOUR money) on additional research like this. That will stimulate the economy so much, it will have multiple orgasms. Then its offspring will be better economies.
That we need to stop rewarding peoples hard work because hard workers are coded for hard work, so why are we celebrating something they had no choice over. Paraphrasing from Orgy of George.
I tend to believe that too.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That being said, the article is rather short in one important area: a suggested mechanism for this sort of inheritance.
Does it really need one?
You can do an experiment, you get results. These results suggest...something. It is able to be duplicated. It follows scientific method and rigor.
The only problem is - most of the methods I can think of this sort of thing using are most decidedly nonscientific. Let's face it - this is closer to philosophy than science. It stands up to testing rigor, but...I just don't see a readily available purely scientific explanation. This experiment seems a little closer to Frank Herbert than modern day science.
For now though, I think it's enough that we can observe this. It suggests interesting things.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
used will be able to learn not to chew on server room wires insulation...
How To Keep Rats From Eating My Cables?
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/12/2115242
My Bouncing Betty Tesla Coils might help...
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1126125&cid=26837909
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Heritability of acquired traits, perhaps - but in a limited framework provided for by genes. This is not a mechanism which could itself give rise to the development of new traits.
Not This Shit Again.
Why wasn't the legendary flatworm experiment enough to silence this debate and banish the disbelievers? Why wasn't RNA's role? Why wasn't epigenetics enough?
I wonder if there's an emotional component to this disbelief? Too many people don't want to know or believe that their own actions and choices before they "settle down" and have children might also outlive them. All too often there are bad or foolish choices made before children are born, and even if lessons are learned later the children may still be inheriting an "instinctive" wild reckless vibe from parents that could outlast the parents and their explicit efforts to counteract it. I've also heard it said that a kitten's personality is largely predetermined by the personality and behavior of its father, regardless whether the father is even present in the environment after birth. If that is even substantially true, how much different will the story be for humans or any other higher-order mammals?
So, Darwin's evolution is not the only evolution?
Great.That's the way of Science: correcting itself and rehabilitating ideas if they get proof.
Lamarck's theory didn't work, but it was a legit scientific theory nonetheless, in that it actually took the risk of telling us something about nature: right or wrong, nothing reduces the scientific rigor and dedication of Lamarck's work and his contribution to biology.
This is a legit revision of mainstream evolution theory, and has nothing to do with non-falsifiable, religious crap.
This is probably the shittiest scifi/fantasy series I've ever researched on wikipedia as a result seeing it mentioned in a random slashdot comment.
And it's hardly surprising, or unknown. Basically, organisms haven't just evolved to a very specific environment, but have also evolved to manage environments that change with time. The ability to pass on certain very specific acquired characteristics is still an evolved trait.
The point with Lamarck was that he thought that all traits behaved in this way, an idea which was easily disproven. It is only a subset of non-genetic traits which are passed to offspring, and then only because specific mechanisms have been put in place by evolution to do so.
From what I understand, many biologists are currently hard at work understanding the non-genetic paths of inheritance (called epigenetics), which include a variety of different things.
a historical document demonstrates the usefulness of that method within human and alien species.
Yes indeed. If only children usually came with some sort of trainer responsible for their education, wellbeing, food, and shelter.
You know... like those mice had, when their parents probably interacted with them in a way that requires more memory skills, since they'd learned them earlier.
gb2/b/ -- this is Slashdot (not Sparta), we have an unbroken chain of crappy memes since Mae Ling Mak (not Natalie Portman) was naked and petrified, and MEEPT! (not a bunch of marketing companies' employees) was dissing Linux.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
I used this same technique to breed my Golden Chocobo.
Were the second generation of mice raised with their environmentally enriched parents? Mice learn, that's obvious, that's how the first generation benefitted from their richer environment. Well, they learn from other mice, too. Like, their parents.
Have they corrected for nurture? Have they corrected for differences in the mother's milk, even?
We have seen regular signs of this phenomena a long time ago. Second and third generation wrestlers, musicians, etc... seems like the genes have cellular memory, and that this can be linked to "characteristics" whether involuntary or not.
I tend to think if you lead a life of hardship, and then you bring a baby into your world,
they are going to know hardship too. They live in the environment we ween them in. Is this really
any big bright new flashy idea, I think someone is trying to find a way to siphon money into useless
projects again.
This was a common misconception until recently. You can read about it here.
Dogs, for example, will pace around in a circle before they lie down. Most dogs kept as pets have never had to bed down in sharp, tall grass like their wolf ancestors did, nevertheless this behavior has been passed down to them over many generations.
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10470
See here
Now, when your egg hatches, you may notice a few things about it. For example, it is at level 5 and the stats are according to that. One interesting thing you may see is that the pokemon knows more moves than it should at level 5. For example, I bred my female Gardevoir and male Wobbuffet together and when I hatched the Ralts egg, it knew Growl, Safeguard, and Destiny Bond. But wait! Itâ(TM)s not supposed to learn Destiny Bond, and Safeguard comes as a TM! Why does this Ralts have both of those moves already?
Breeding is a very useful technique when you want to aquire your movesets because of the fact that you can breed over two different sets of moves: Technical Machine aquired moves, and âoeEgg Movesâ. Earthquake is a very popular move used by almost every physical sweeper, but the problem with this is that you only get one TM 26. You can however chain-breed it to any pokemon you would like. Chain breeding? Some pokemon can only get a move through breeding only if you first breed two other pokemon for a male version and breed it again to the pokemon you wish for a certain move to be on. For example, say I wanted to breed Rock Slide to a Cradily. First, I would need to get a Male Relicanth and Female Corsola, breed for a Male Corsola with Rock Slide and breed that with a Female Cradily/Lileep for a Lileep with Rock Slide.
Their conclusion is only one possibility. Far more likely, the mice learned memory-improving behaviours during their enriching experience, and taught those behaviours (perhaps mostly by example) to their offspring.
Many behaviours are learned, and they can create functional differences.
I've been trying to read the second book in the series, but it has an even more ridiculous overabundance of military acronyms than the first book. I don't care for the Ringo's dialog style. His descriptions of action sequences are pretty good, but slogging through the rest of the book makes it almost not worth trying to read.
The author does seem a bit full of himself, as in the plot of the first book, the first people the military went running to when the aliens landed were the science fiction authors.....
It's well known that sperm and eggs develop separately at the time of conception on... the DNA in sperm and eggs is not the same as that in the host body...
Which is to say that they could have genetically modified the host while neglecting to modify the sperm/eggs of the host and the offspring of the gen-modded mice would be 'normal' mice without the modifications at all.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
Too many people are in need of that part of religion that explains the unknown of the tangible world. Science fills this need where religion once did (for some people) and they have a tendency to act in similar irrational ways about the secure illusion provided by science as they would have before its popularity.
Science knows nothing (metaphor, science literally is just a methodology.)
It knows and finds truth better than any other human tool but it is still quite limited and very young (it's still run on humans.)
We just started in this field; 150 years ago it was a big deal to even say there was some logical connection between species. We know a little bit about DNA and now we think we know everything... and are creating mutants and releasing them in the wild arrogantly thinking we are improving upon nature.
Yet we can act like know-it-alls with the infinitely complex chaotic real world!
There is a great deal to discover and some of it may be beyond human comprehension-- which is limited by how well we can abstract complex ideas and how fast we can learn them.
We can't even master computer science, which is 100% man made and extremely exacting unlike the other sciences.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Once again the news media loves to misrepresent the science to make it seem like there is some "controversy." These ideas have not been controversial, and the idea that certain acquired traits can be inheritable has been accepted for a long, long time. I'm not surprised, though, ./ has no shame.
Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Darwin was merely a good scientist who was the first to publish an important theory that turned out to be true. But a lot of people make more out of him than that.
A good scientst, yes, but not the first to publish. If you actually read Darwin, which of course nobody ever does, he quite explicitly and honorably gives credit to the man who first published "a theory of the origin of species by means of natural selection" (nowadays popularly and incorrectly known as Darwin's theory of evolution).
I freely acknowledge that Mr. [Patrick] Matthew has anticipated by many years the explanation which I have offered of the origin of species, under the name of natural selection. [...] I can do no more than offer my apologies to Mr. Matthew for my entire ignorance of his publication.
--Charles Darwin, Down, Bromley, Kent. 13 April 1860
I've been told several times by molecular biologists who study DNA and phylogeny that Lamarck was more correct than Darwin in most of his scientific publications, but Lysenko's corruption of Lamarck's ideas and public adoration of Darwin have caused people to emphasize Lamarck's mistakes and to ignore Darwin's.
It means that or hints that brain chemistry has biochemical effects on us and our offspring via genetics. Animal husbandry would tell us this if we listened, but we need to see it in humans to fully 'get it'... I don't want to say that this is more evidence for the support of eugenics, but... well, it seems likely.
No, that's a logical error. You are saying that there's a process by which a population of organisms changes the characters of individual organisms over time in response to environment, and therefore members of that population should subvert that process by taking control over it and replacing the existing environmental feedback mechanisms with human planning.
There's no good reason for that, other than hubris or o'erweening pride ("I am so smart, I am god!") and at least one good reason not to - the process by definition works, so fucking with it intentionally could destabilize the dynamic equilibrium that characterizes feedback loops.
"It exists, and therefore I can make it better" is not reasonable or logical. There needs to be a more complex and nuanced argument if you're going to try to argue in favor of eugenics. The argument you're going to have to defeat is "it exists, and therefore is a system flexible and reliable enough to function without human management, so leave it alone and spend efforts elsewhere".
I'm going to give the researchers the benefit of the doubt here and assume they found something apart from that the second generation were raised by smarter parents.
Lamarckian inheritance is very interesting and isn't a particularly stupid idea, apart from the fact that it doesn't match real world genetics. Because biological organisms have their phenotype largely specified by DNA, a parent would need to have their acquired characteristics transcribed back into their DNA somehow to pass it on - doesn't happen.
But before you forget about Lamarckian inheritance as just another idea that doesn't work, consider how many non-genetic acquired characteristics are passed on from generation to generation. Language, society, and knowledge in humans, and behaviours like hunting and bird songs in animals. Acquired characteristics ARE passed on, but not genetically. Influential teachers can pass their characteristics on far more widely than the most prodigious parents.
.evom ton seod gis eht
I have seen so many people screaming "Lamarckism! Lamarck was right!" Because they want to imply "Darwin wrong!" or "Genetics wrong!" to generate a headline. While this stuff is interesting, it's not Lamarck. It's an interesting genetically controlled chemical phenomenon. It should have been expected. You evolve to deal with issues. You have chemical controls on DNA replication and interpretation. In shorter life span animals than humans, this can be a great advantage.
It ain't Lamarck. Lamarck says that if you cut off a tail of an animal, in generation after generation, after a while, the animal won't have a tail. Lamarck says that if a giraffe needs a longer neck to reach leaves, it will stretch upward and that act of stretching will make its children taller. And that change will go forth, generation after generation.
This stuff is vaguely like Lamarck, but it ain't Lamarck. People bring him into the conversation to get the uneducated excited. And at base, what they really want to say is "Darwin was wrong" because that gets dumb people really excited, which in turn sells newspapers -- now Darwin didn't say anything about mechanisms, so he's not wrong. And this new stuff doesn't tell us that anything about how we generally understand mechanisms is wrong. It's just that there's more. Well, that's fine. Go study that. Yes, we'll fund you. Shut up with the Lamarck crap.
So we should expect to see female babies being born with silicone breast implants any time now?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I've always personally suspected (from hueristic observational conclusion) that there was a Lamarckian mechanismm to evolutionary change!
Validation rules!
Lamarck's Signature : How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm Published Dec 1 1999 http://www.amazon.com/Lamarcks-Signature-Retrogenes-Changing-Selection/dp/0738201715
As has probably been pointed out by slashdotters, as well as experts, concluding anything about the effect of a parent's environment to genes of the offspring is just plain dumb.
All they did was show that parents pass on what they have learned to their offspring. Don't know about you, but I already kind of realized this, as did the entire field of developmental psychology.
In order for me to conclude anything else, this is what the experiment must have looked like. There should be three groups of mice with the genetic defect, A B C. Group A should be the one "taught" to have better memory. Groups B and C should be left to develop normally. Fertilized eggs from group A should have been transplanted to females in group B. Group C should be left to reproduce naturally. Then, the offspring of groups B and C should be compared against each other. B's babies have any advantage over C's, then that is pretty much hard evidence that the genetic composition of the offspring of group A was somehow modified to reflect A's parents' development (without removing the original defect).
This would be hard evidence because A's offspring's environment would have had no chance to be affected by their parents, after birth OR in the womb.
I have to admit that I didn't make the effort to read the original article, and my comment is only a response to what some other commenters here seemed to conclude from it.
weinersmith
It is not as if they were fed antacid and their offspring had less heartburn. These were genetically engineered. The fact that their offspring inherited the trait indicates nothing particularly remarkable except that they may have modified more than they intended. All of evolution is based on mutations being inherited. That's Darwin, not Lamarck.
Stealing from Niven and Pournelle (Footfall) isn't a sin.
On the other hand, this is the only author I know of who inserted himself and another author into a book as supporting characters, and then has the other author's character kill the character representing himself. Over book sales, I might add.
Unfortunately, Ringo is ex-military, so he's still in love with military jargon. Which is full of (mostly) incomprehensible acronyms - FEBA, anyone (which used to be called the Front, by the way)
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I really don't like the idea of Lamarckian thoughts as they require a "mystic" connection. Somehow after reproduction physiological information is acquired presumably from the biological parents. I find it much more likely that a process which the biological parents could pass onto their offspring with fully understood physiological mechanisms is simpler and more possible: encoded in the organism's genome are "repair" codings. The repair codings simply run in parallel and were somehow selected from environmental cues to cybernetically (as in, auto-correction feedback methods) restore a "back-up" of "important" regions from a different part of the genome to restore functionality in areas that were undesirable to be damaged by random genetic mutation, in this case memory functions, throughout an organism's genetic-"life".
Shh.
I can't even read him anymore. Ringo is the current foremost purveyor of what I like to call "...and then those hippies will be sorry!" science fiction. --Aliens will invade our defenseless, unarmed civilization...and then those liberal gun-haters will be sorry! --Evil warring factions will revert our utopian dreamworld to bronze-age barbarism...and then those limp-wristed hippies will be sorry! etc.etc. He also engages in another of my pet peeves, i.e. using the lofty vantage point of his (imaginary) future position to have his characters condescend to and ridicule us poor benighted (real) present dwellers about his pet political issues. All science fiction does this to a certain extent, but Ringo literally has characters say things like "Those poor 21st century people really believed their planet was warming, the enviro-commie schmucks...and then they were sorry."
snig
Whatever happened to those studies of Planaria (flatworms) that when you trained them to avoid electric shocks, then chopped 'em up and fed 'em to other flatworms, the new flatworms KNEW to avoid the electric shocks?
I say we tase a few guys, chop 'em up and...
Oh wait... this is getting too disgusting. Let's stay with the bloodsuckers.
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- aqk
F U