My first impression skimming through, is that what it’s arguing is that abuse by parents can negatively affect a child, and that stress can have both positive and negative effects, and that individual responses to stress determine the balance of positive to negative effects.
2 things I want to point out:
I think that the conclusions from this study are almost certainly extremely limited, and I wouldn’t trust these results to generalize to other species like us.
I expect the results, in so far as they are real and generalizable, to be essentially that the genome can influence things later in life via indirect methods, but mostly can’t directly specify it via hardcoding it or baking it directly in as prior information, and the transfer seems very limited, and critically the timescale is likely on evolutionary timescales, which is far, far slower than human within-lifetime learning timescales, and certainly not as much as the many bits cultural evolution can give in a much shorter timeframe.
I will edit the post to modify the any to more as many bits as cultural evolution, and edit it more to say what I really meant here.
The reason I trust my impression here is because I have information where I have good reason to suspect that epigenetics in general is basically a P-hacked field, where the results are pure noise and indicate that epigenetics probably can’t work, so yes I’m skeptical of epigenetics being a viable way to transmit information throughout the generations, or really epigenetics being useful at all.
I trust my impression here is because I have information
Then I should update on epigenetics is not supported by evidence. And also about my chances to post nasty and arrogant when my medication change. Sorry about that.
However, I have a question about the large or small amount of bits.
Suppose Musk offers you a private island with a colony of hominids – the kind raw enough that they haven’t yet invented cooking with fire. Then he insists very hard that you introduce strong sexual selection, which led to one of those big monkeys inventing parading in front of the girls with a stick on fire.
Soon everyone is cooking, ensuring so many slack, physiology speaking, that chatting with the girls becomes the main driver of their evolution. So hard, in fact, that if you were a selfish gene living in some good girl, you’d be better off hurting your pussy than refusing to raise babies with the biggest brains possible.
At this point, I would consider that you may have replicated the basic recipe for creating the human mind. Of course, maybe this is just a fairy tale. Or something in between, like a real but less important component than, say, chimpanzee wars. But if you were able to measure the bit ratio in this scenario (number of bits from epigenetics versus number of bits from the genome), what do you think that would look like?
http://allmanlab.caltech.edu/biCNS217_2008/PDFs/Meaney2001.pdf
My first impression skimming through, is that what it’s arguing is that abuse by parents can negatively affect a child, and that stress can have both positive and negative effects, and that individual responses to stress determine the balance of positive to negative effects.
2 things I want to point out:
I think that the conclusions from this study are almost certainly extremely limited, and I wouldn’t trust these results to generalize to other species like us.
I expect the results, in so far as they are real and generalizable, to be essentially that the genome can influence things later in life via indirect methods, but mostly can’t directly specify it via hardcoding it or baking it directly in as prior information, and the transfer seems very limited, and critically the timescale is likely on evolutionary timescales, which is far, far slower than human within-lifetime learning timescales, and certainly not as much as the many bits cultural evolution can give in a much shorter timeframe.
I will edit the post to modify the any to more as many bits as cultural evolution, and edit it more to say what I really meant here.
[downvoted]
The reason I trust my impression here is because I have information where I have good reason to suspect that epigenetics in general is basically a P-hacked field, where the results are pure noise and indicate that epigenetics probably can’t work, so yes I’m skeptical of epigenetics being a viable way to transmit information throughout the generations, or really epigenetics being useful at all.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zazA44CaZFE7rb5zg/transhumanism-genetic-engineering-and-the-biological-basis#DyJvphnBuwiK6MNpo
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zazA44CaZFE7rb5zg/transhumanism-genetic-engineering-and-the-biological-basis#JeDuMpKED7k9zAiYC
Then I should update on epigenetics is not supported by evidence. And also about my chances to post nasty and arrogant when my medication change. Sorry about that.
However, I have a question about the large or small amount of bits.
Suppose Musk offers you a private island with a colony of hominids – the kind raw enough that they haven’t yet invented cooking with fire. Then he insists very hard that you introduce strong sexual selection, which led to one of those big monkeys inventing parading in front of the girls with a stick on fire.
Soon everyone is cooking, ensuring so many slack, physiology speaking, that chatting with the girls becomes the main driver of their evolution. So hard, in fact, that if you were a selfish gene living in some good girl, you’d be better off hurting your pussy than refusing to raise babies with the biggest brains possible.
At this point, I would consider that you may have replicated the basic recipe for creating the human mind. Of course, maybe this is just a fairy tale. Or something in between, like a real but less important component than, say, chimpanzee wars. But if you were able to measure the bit ratio in this scenario (number of bits from epigenetics versus number of bits from the genome), what do you think that would look like?