Epigenetics

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have long known that infants born to women who are obese show higher risks of obesity, but they don’t fully understand what boosts those risks. Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center now have demonstrated that umbilical cells from children of obese or overweight mothers show impaired expression of key genes regulating cell energy and metabolism, compared to similar cells from babies of non-obese mothers. … Isganaitis adds that mothers and healthcare providers also could carefully monitor the growth patterns and nutrition of children at risk of obesity, both in the first two years of life and afterwards. “Your risk of chronic diseases isn’t set in stone at birth; there are many different periods in which your lifelong disease Read More ›

Here. From Genetics and Epigenetics: The evolution process includes genetic alterations which started with prokaryotes and now continues in humans. A distinct difference between prokaryotic chromosomes and eukaryotic chromosomes involves histones. As evolution progressed, genetic alterations accumulated and a mechanism for gene selection developed. It was as if nature was experimenting to optimally utilize the gene pool without changing individual gene sequences. This mechanism is called epigenetics, as it is above the genome. Curiously, the mechanism of epigenetic regulation in prokaryotes is strikingly different from that in eukaryotes, mainly higher eukaryotes, like mammals. In fact, epigenetics plays a huge role in the conserved process of embryogenesis and human development. Malfunction of epigenetic regulation results in many types of undesirable effects, Read More ›

In The Paradigm Shifters: Overthrowing “the Hegemony of the Culture of Darwin,” Oxford’s Denis Noble explains to Suzan Mazur why our understanding of evolution needs to be replaced, not merely extended: The reasons I think we’re talking about replacement rather than extension are several. The first is that the exclusion of any form of acquired characteristics being inherited was a central feature of the modern synthesis. IN other words, to exclude any form of inheritance that was non-Mendelian, that was Lamarckian-like, was an essential part of the modern synthesis. What we are now discovering is that there are mechanisms by which some acquired characteristics can be inherited, and inherited robustly. So it;s a bit odd to describe adding something like that Read More ›

From Sara Reardon at Nature News: Children from impoverished families are more prone to mental illness, and alterations in DNA structure could be to blame, according to a study published on 24 May in Molecular Psychiatry … The scientists found that children who grew up in poverty had more methylation in this region [SLC6A4 gene] compared to their wealthier peers. This might have suppressed the poor children’s production of serotonin transporter protein, so that they had less serotonin available to the brain — a condition linked to depression. The children’s amygdalas also became more active, and those who had a family history of depression were more likely to become depressed themselves. But of course there may be a huge tangle Read More ›

Say Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at Nautilus: That’s right, the most compelling evidence for transgenerational epigenetics is in rodents, not humans. We are fans of animal research, but as Pinker noted, the strengths of it (fast reproductive cycles allowing for the study of numerous generations in a short window of time) may also curtail its applicability to humans in this particular case. Additionally, scientists can randomly manipulate a rodent pup’s exposure to different parenting/rearing strategies. But doing this with human babies would never fly with a university ethics committee. When you can’t do experiments, you have to be very careful about something called confounding. Confounding is a pernicious problem that can make one thing look like it’s causing something Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers chart landscape of genetic, epigenetic regulation in plants New findings yield insights into how plants get their traits. Revealing a landscape of protein-binding zones on DNA, collectively dubbed the “cistrome,” shows how plants control where and when genes are expressed. Previous methods for mapping the cistrome in plant cells were difficult and slow, but the new approach, say authors, overcomes those hurdles to offer a sweeping view of this critical aspect of genetic regulation. … Lots of information in plant and animal cells is contained in “coding” stretches of DNA that have the instructions to make proteins, the physical workhorses of cells. But researchers are increasingly realizing that other sections of the genome have elements that control Read More ›

From Michael Eisen: Epigenetics is used as shorthand in the popular press for any of a loosely connected set of phenomenon purported to result in experience being imprinted in DNA and transmitted across time and generations. Its place in our lexicon has grown as biochemical discoveries have given ideas of extra-genetic inheritance an air of molecular plausibility. Biologists now invoke epigenetics to explain all manner of observations that lie outside their current ken. Epigenetics pops up frequently among non-scientists in all manner of discussions about heredity. And all manner of crackpots slap “epigenetics” on their fringy ideas to give them a veneer of credibility. But epigenetics has achieved buzzword status far faster and to a far larger extent than current Read More ›

Some starving hack got it in the neck. From Nature News: Researcher under fire for New Yorker epigenetics article A story about epigenetics in the 2 May issue of The New Yorker has been sharply criticized for inaccurately describing how genes are regulated. The article by Siddhartha Mukherjee — a physician, cancer researcher and award-winning author at Columbia University in New York — examines how environmental factors can change the activity of genes without altering the DNA sequence. Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, posted two widely discussed blog posts calling the piece “superficial and misleading”, largely because it ignored key aspects of gene regulation. Other researchers quoted in the blog posts called the Read More ›

It is often said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. And so it is with epigenetics which evolutionists opposed and blackballed for a century before finally appropriating it as just another mode of evolutionary change. (see here, here, andhere for more discussion of this history of misdirections regarding Lamarckism and epigenetics). Here is an example of evolutionists, after a century of denial and rejection, claiming epigenetics as their own.  Read more

From ScienceDaily: A study of over 6,000 mothers and their newborn children — one of the largest studies of its kind — solidifies the evidence that smoking cigarettes while pregnant chemically modifies a fetus’ DNA, mirroring patterns seen in adult smokers. The researchers also identify new development-related genes affected by smoking. The work suggests a potential explanation for the link between smoking during pregnancy and health complications in children. More. Some SJWs have complained that all this epigenetics stuff could harm women’s rights because they will be put under pressure or expected to behave in approved ways while pregnant. Huh? It comes down to whether or not a person actually wants to know what’s going on. Women get blamed for Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Dr. Rechavi and his team had previously identified a “small RNA inheritance” mechanism through which RNA molecules produced a response to the needs of specific cells and how they were regulated between generations. “We previously showed that worms inherited small RNAs following the starvation and viral infections of their parents. These small RNAs helped prepare their offspring for similar hardships,” Dr. Rechavi said. “We also identified a mechanism that amplified heritable small RNAs across generations, so the response was not diluted. We found that enzymes called RdRPs are required for re-creating new small RNAs to keep the response going in subsequent generations.” Most inheritable epigenetic responses in C.elegans worms were found to persist for only a few generations. Read More ›

In graduate school I had an evolution professor who made the absurd claim that he had solved the protein folding problem—one of the most challenging conundrums in molecular biology. And did he have any examples? No, that was left to the student. It was embarrassing. At another time he referenced a proof of evolution. But again, it was a hollow claim. Unfortunately this sort of phony science is what evolution is all about. The latest example is in how evolutionists are handling epigenetics.  Read more

From Brian Boutwell and J.C. Barnes at the Boston Globe: Is crime genetic? Scientists don’t know because they’re afraid to ask … Ah, heritability. A term that is much maligned in disciplines like criminology and often serves as a wellspring of confusion. Well, in Carrie Buck’s case, it wasn’t exactly confusion, was it?: The vote was 8 to 1. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion dispensed with young Carrie Buck’s physical integrity in five paragraphs, the six cruelest words of which characterized Virginia’s interest in preventing Buck from burdening the state with her defective offspring: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” More from Boutwell and Barnes: Most of the evidence about the causes of crime overlooks genetic transmission. Yet, some Read More ›

From Science Daily: Could the food we eat affect our genes? Study in yeast suggests this may be the case “Cellular metabolism plays a far more dynamic role in the cells than we previously thought,” explains Dr Ralser. “Nearly all of a cell’s genes are influenced by changes to the nutrients they have access to. In fact, in many cases the effects were so strong, that changing a cell’s metabolic profile could make some of its genes behave in a completely different manner. “The classical view is that genes control how nutrients are broken down into important molecules, but we’ve shown that the opposite is true, too: how the nutrients break down affects how our genes behave.” The researchers believe Read More ›

Richard Mabey, author of The Cabaret of Plants: Forty Thousand Years of Plant Life and the Human Imagination, was interviewed recently by National Geographic: There Is Such a Thing as Plant Intelligence … We tend to judge plants not as autonomous organisms but in terms of what they can do for us. But they’re astonishing in their own right and deserve to be given the same ethical status as animals. … It’s long been known that the trees in a forest are connected by mycorrhizal fungi. This means fungi that live symbiotically with the roots of forest trees. The forest trees can’t grow without them because they haven’t got enough access to the minerals in the soil, and the fungi Read More ›