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Does Crime Leave a Genetic Trace?
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.
The cat translator is still in early stages, however the reply was more or less "it tastes like chicken".
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We're just a hop skip and a jump away from eugenics.
Does this mean Lamarckian evolution is partially correct after all?
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
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
The linked website looks like fad journalism. Big splashy page with a headline. Screems bias found here.
It has a great deal of wisdom about human nature. That it is unscientific in origin doesn't make it false, or like your stopped clock analogy, only coincidentally true.
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Violence happens when otherwise friendly people are provoked. In the case of the poor, it's usually when they are goaded by someone in a position of power. We've all seen the peculiar attitude rich and powerful people develop when they feel free to jut out their chin and say "what are you going to do about it?"
Alcholism happens when powerless people have nowhere else to hide.
People who are powerless become destructive: either to themselves or others. The reason this situation persists is because there are people in this world who are never held accountable for their single-minded pursuit of making other people powerless.
Did you learn to be an asshole or did your great grandfather's wife run off with a black guy?
I will go on the record predicting this research will widely be discredited within the next 5 years. I’m not saying there is no epigenome, but why would it work in an apparent anti-Lemarkin fashion, let alone anti-Darwinian? The implication is that nobody gets bad-genes, just that genes get shunted aside for multiple generations due to changes in the epigenome.
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.
Letter To Iran
... fertilization. I think it was the NYT that discussed this a week or two ago. A woman who carried a gene for a cruel genetic disease wanted to have children, but not to pass on the disease. So she opted for In Vitro Fertilization, with the fertilized zygotes being genetically tested. She has had I think two or three children from zygotes that tested negative. If everyone who carries her disease gene does this, than a rare but terrible scourge could be eliminated from the earth. Her father, for example, is doomed to die young and is already suffering. However I myself have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. It is as yet unclear whether that is a unique disease or the, uh, "lucky" combination of Manic Depression and Schizophrenia. The cause of Schizophrenia is as yet unclear but is thought to be due to infectious disease of the brain. It may have other causes, as it is likely to be more than one disease, each of which causes the psychotic symptoms of delusions and hallucinations. Manic Depression is quite clearly genetic, due to studies in which twins were adopted out to different parents at birth. There is a strong correlation between whether one twin is Bipolar, and whether the other is. That can't be due to environmental factors, or how one is raised. Manic depression is arguably a horrible disease. I myself have attempted suicide in a serious way a number of times, the last time in 2010 when I wrapped my car around a concrete highway overpass post at a hundred miles per hour. But dammit I forgot to unbuckle my seatbelt. It was a sudden decision, the end it all, you see. However Manic Depressives are well-documented to be uncommonly creative. Besides coding, I have a BA in Physics, while I did not complete my doctorate I stymied my fellow students, even the faculty, with my insight into the nature of reality when was in grad school. I draw, paint, sculpt, compose for and play the piano, sing and play drums. I invent all manner of things. I could have lots of patents if I could be bothered to ever file for them. Kay Redfield Jamison is a noted authority on manic depression, and a Johns Hopkins University psychology professor. She speculates that Manic Depression has persisted through evolution despite its obvious disadvantages because "it brings new ideas into the social consciousness". Hollowell and Ratey propose a similar theory for why Attention Deficit Disorder has persisted through evolution as well. Their theory is that people with ADHD are able to connect otherwise unrelated ideas in a way that the brains of normal people would be incapable of, thereby synthesizing novel ideas. For example despite being bent on suicide the whole time I worked at Medior, I invented then implemented a novel lossless bitmapped graphics compression algorithm and format, that enabled the company to stuff more assets on its multimedia CD-ROMs. Now suppose you chose In Vitro Fertilization because you or your mate had spent your whole lives contemplating suicide. You have a choice of a normal zygote, or one that will quite obviously bear a child who will be Bipolar as an adult. Which one do you choose? Were manic depression eliminated from the species, what would our society be like a thousand years from now? Jamison's new ideas wouldn't be getting contributed to the social consciousness nearly as much anymore.
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Don't mention this to the Aussies.
human nature, for example. I don't believe in G-d, but I own a bible and read it from time to time. It helps me to understand other people. G-d has nothing to do with that.
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We're all stressed out, and can't deal with it.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
And what's wrong with eugenics? Hitler gave it a bad name with his fancifully eugenic atrocities, but it's not like we don't already apply the principles to every other species we domesticate. We even do it to ourselves - all else being equal, I assume you would prefer a beautiful, healthy, and probably smart and/or strong reproductive partner. Eugenics just requires doing what we're already doing to ourselves bit more consciously.
As for biological psychology, I'll admit it can be abused in fanciful ways, just as Social Darwinists abuse the principles of evolution. But ignoring it leads to such patently ridiculous claims as Tabla Rasa and the sameness of the sexes.
Meanwhile in this case we're talking about epigenetics anyway, extrapolating the results to humans (always dicey, but...) the results suggest that subjecting people to traumatic or other high-stress stimuli will harm not only their own well-being, but also that of at their children and grandchildren. In other words - working that horrible high-stress job so that you'll one day be able to bring your children into a better life may actually be counter-productive, because while you're providing them with more luxuries and opportunities, you're also saddling them with a genetic disability.
Not to mention the implications of having children with somebody with PTSD - you're potentially saddling your children with not only an emotionally damaged parent, but also a genetic predisposition to follow in their footprints. On the other hand, as we come to understand the mechanisms involved we may well learn how to reverse such epigenetic changes, and that could have enormous benefits for our society.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
On the one hand, nobody wants the poor to suffer, especially poor children. And nobody wants the government to decide who has the right to have kids. On the other hand, you get more of what you subsidize, and our society pays poor people to have children. How much crime, poverty, and general misery is caused by people who should never have children, and yet have children? (Often, lots of children?) People worry about "income inequality," but here's a not-insignificant source of at least part of it.
It's tempting to condition welfare on "no more kids" (sterilization), but that's never going to fly, and feels far too totalitarian. And yet, here we are trapped in a system of positive (the bad kind) feedback: Bad parents are paid to have kids, those kids (epigenetically or otherwise) transmit the same dysfunctional traits to their kids, and so society pays for more crime and poverty and misery. I don't have an answer, but I don't think enough people see the problem. They'll just blame their political opponents or capitalism or whatever.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
I am no psychologist but from the stories it sounds as if the people were surrounded by chaos. They had no loving parent, no guidance and no one to rely on for help. Essentially they are lost souls. They go from one bad situation to another and make poor choices simply because they can't understand a normal life. And even though people try to do better later in life they have a lot of emotional baggage from their youth that comes back to haunt them. And that is when history repeats itself.
Imagine never growing up without money or a parent who gave a damn about you. I lost my father when I was 14 but my mother made sure we had money and got an education. She was on top of us pretty good and saw to it that we weren't getting into trouble or hanging out with the wrong crowd. And if my mother needed help there were other family members to help out.
Contrast that with having little to no family. No money. No education. No hope of ever getting out of that life. It must leave a person with a great feeling of despair. Its so depressing that I can't fathom it. And that chaos is passed down from one generation to another. But cycles can and are broken by determined individuals, often with outside help. Its not completely hopeless but for people in those situations they just don't understand how to get help.
This sounds familiar except it was about diet.
Ah yes here it is:
http://io9.com/how-an-1836-famine-altered-the-genes-of-children-born-d-1200001177
I'm pretty sure the amount of lead in the environment is a more useful predictor of violent behavior than genetics.
If you look at violent crime in the US, for instance, you see a big drop-off starting with the generation after the regulations were put on lead.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Some of my best friends are Jewish. Actually it was Kuro5hin's LilDebbie who started doing it over there. I picked it up from him. The Jewish faith holds that it is disrespectful to ever destroy a document that has the word "God" written on it, if it is spelled correctly. The explanation I read pointed out that the attics of very old synagogues held used collection of worn-out Torah, because they spell the word correctly and so would be disrespectful to destroy. My understanding is that it is not considered blasphemy to do so, only disrespectful. Among Jewish people it is customary to write "G-d" unless one can be reasonably sure that the resulting document will never be destroyed. While I no longer believe, I was raised as a Presbyterian. Religion at one time was a big part of my life. I'm not sure I follow the arguments of those who regard religion as evil incarnate because the belief in supernatural beings is unrealistic or unscientific. Consider that these days, it is very uncommon for most Americans to ever speak to their neighbors. But among religious people, we get to know the others in our church. I am often advised by those who don't even believe, to attend church anyway as it's a good way to meet women who want to get married and have children, as I want to.
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Hopefully, if there ever is another Minority Report cinematic adaptation, this new research will be taken into account. Because if the propensity or inclination for crime can be inherited in a Biblical sense as a couple of people have already posted, then this should make for a more interesting movie about how the society in that PKD story's universe (or the society that it is commenting about, namely us) can persecute and condemn not only one man members of his family and even their descendents.
Crime is a social construct. It's usually a case of being rather poor and/or having opportunity outweighing the risks.
In some fundamentalist country homosexuality is a crime by law. If the regime would be toppled today, and said laws
would be reversed, would the genetic makeup of aformentioned criminals suddenly flip?
Please tell me the browser cache is screwing with me. Please tell me that my wife wants to have sex more often ( ok that isn't going to happen, I have a 12 and 15 year old) Do we really have Slashdot.org back?
What disturbs me most about this story is that the "stressful situations" must essentially be mouse torture. Having to do things like that are why I'd never be able to do lab work involving live animals. I'd probably end up releasing them or smuggling them out and turning them into pets.
The Jewish faith does not in fact consider it disrespectul to write "God" as "G" "o" "d". What it considers disrespectful, is to spell the word "God" correctly, then destroy the document that it is written on.
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""As for biological psychology, I'll admit it can be abused in fanciful ways, just as Social Darwinists abuse the principles of evolution. But ignoring it leads to such patently ridiculous claims as Tabla Rasa and the sameness of the sexes.""
""Yea, and whats wrong with Communism? All of those mass genocides just gave it a bad name. Surely we can do it right if we try again.""
There is no defined definition of "Communism" and with it, or without it, you cannot stop a leader who decides to abuse there power and set there own rules/ideals and it is usually over political propaganda, banning anyone opposed to there ideals. There are more dictators that do not use Communist ideals that have caused mass genocide.
And if you look at the US they've mastered how to prevent people from realizing they do not live in a Democratic system. They tried using Communism as a threat to implement there own version of censorship, and it just about succeeded. You only need to look at the history of Communist propaganda in the US governments history to see the ideals in communism were being forced onto citizens. Or look at there spying programs from the 30's up till today, and those they target are usually leaders of some movement that had nothing to do with communism, but believed that the US should truly be a free country, where all men/women were to be treated as equals. Oh yeah those leaders oddly were found murdered.
They responded with blocky black and white letters, in all capitals, with characteristically bad spelling and grammar.
I knew I shouldn't have ejaculated all over the display model before stealing that TV.
Monstar L
My mother was a mouse, you insensitive clod! (And I turned out OK...)
Who is John Cabal?
And so Cesare Lombroso wasn't so wrong after all!
Quote GK Chesterton, âoeThe blue cross":
"Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at the stars. Don't they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires?" well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamants, with fields of brilliants.think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire.But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find the noticeboard, "thou shalt not steal."
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
You really don't see the difference in intentionally harming something vice consuming it for survival?
Snakes have to eat. Men do not have to torture ... anything.
But if you subscribe to the contrary, then experiments on humans should be cool, right? It's just a matter of shifting your benchmark for 'acceptable' slightly AND the results are far more validly extended to our species than mouse experiments.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Any child raised by mice would have disturbing psychological behaviours.
- Good things come to he who waits... but, but Arch Linux FTW!
Somebody has to feed the lab mouse to the lab snake, which will cause obvious torture to the mouse. I wouldn't be able to do it, but I don't object to it.
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