> “This study shows that paternal exercise can confer benefits — enhanced endurance and metabolic health — to offspring,”
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
But that's not what it says. RNA fragments are entering the ovum and having some sort of effect .... that's quite different from passing traits the way genes on chromosomes do.
the section immediately after that you didn’t quote:
> evidence keeps piling up. Most recently, in November 2025, a comprehensive paper (opens a new tab) published in Cell Metabolism traced the downstream molecular effects of a father mouse’s exercise regimen on sperm microRNAs that target genes “critical for mitochondrial function and metabolic control” in a developing embryo. The researchers found many of those same RNAs overexpressed in the sperm of well-exercised human men.
I and others generally don't quote things that aren't relevant to the point we're making and I'm not keen on the crypt-accusation. I didn't say that there aren't downstream molecular effects--clearly there are. Rather, the article is very unclear about the nature of epigenetics, and the wording about "transmitting traits" is misleading at best and leads to many unwarranted conclusions, as evidenced in the comments here. The statements I quoted are not about transmitting traits. e.g., "paternal exercise" refers to a trait of exercising, taking time to exercise, being motivated to exercise, etc. The "conferred benefit" of "enhanced endurance and metabolic health" is a different trait. If that is the trait being transmitted then that should be the trait being identified in male parents, not "exercise". Similarly, being exposed to nicotine is not the trait of having livers that are good at "disarming" nicotine, cocaine, and a host of other toxins ... and this is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence, and the article provides one citation, from 2017.
And as an epigeneticist says in the article, we have no idea how RNA is having the effects its having.
As I said, I'm happy to wait until we have moved beyond this early stage of research before making any radical inferences.
In the “paternal exercise” case the trait isn’t the habit of exercising, it’s the metabolic changes of exercise that are (apparently) conferred to both father and offspring.
I agree. The example with Nicotine intake having a somewhat positive effect on the children feels too wild at the money. Think of all the kids of the 60th and 70th. They must be immune to most toxins ;). Yes I take this example to the extreme. I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory. Why would it take so long for a given treat to establish itself. Maybe I mix too much into one bag after reading this one article.
>I also feel that this could maybe contradict what we learned from evolution theory.
It doesn't, but the article doesn't go into this detail, so people unfamiliar with the field wouldn't understand why. The keyword is epigenetics. I.e. how certain genes become activated or deactivated through behaviour and/or environmental influences. But the DNA sequence itself remains unaltered. So no evolution necessary. There are basically a bunch of molecules than sit on top of your DNA that regulate gene expression. They don't just tell a cell to behave like a skin cell or a brain cell, they also regulate the entire cellular metabolism. The discovery that male sperm can also transmit this epigenetic information to offspring is relatively new, but now that we know that, it makes total sense that these gene-expression-modifying behaviours in fathers could affect their children. After all, they simply get to start with a good (or bad) bunch of epigenetic markers. They will not persist across many generations though, so it has no real long term effect on evolution. It may even be an evolved mechanism that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes on timeframes that would be prohibited by evolution.
Not all epigenetics is regulation of gene expression. The article says "these molecules transmit traits to offspring and that they can regulate embryonic development after fertilization" -- that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate--it certainly isn't true in the way that genes express traits. And then they quote an actual epigeneticist saying
“We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part”
>that's from the reporter, but I don't have faith that "transmit traits" is at all accurate
It is pretty accurate, even if we don't understand all details yet. Here's a review article of the current research that's not from a popsci journalist: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37820-2
> ”They will not persist across many generations though”
Why not? Is there some tempering mechanism on epigenetic transfer? I could imagine that some sperm-conferred epigenetic markers could continue down the male descendants unbroken.
Speaking mostly from personal experience here, if a kid gets a suped-up liver from their dad's smoking habits, cool. But how many kids fathers stopped smoking when the kid was born? My point, the father's smoking habits may have passed down a strong liver but his continued use damaged the child's lungs and possibly more.
These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.
If true, I suppose there is also a opportunity cost involved. Meaning selecting for better coping with nicotine, does not help selecting for smarter offspring and maybe even preventing that. So it might be somewhat positive but at a cost unknown.
Also there are the very known costs of nicotine damaging sperms, or of course being in literal smoke as a child (or adult) and deal with those real effects.
>Think of all the kids of the 60th and 70th. They must be immune to most toxins ;).
60th and 70th what?? :)
But seriously though, "immune" is a humorous exaggeration, but I'm not sure we have data to rule out the idea that this cohort has increased tolerance to some environmental toxins.
So it's possible the level of harm we see today is already "post-" this protective effect, if any.
I figured, just a joke playing off their typo (hence the smiley).
There were plenty of non-"drug" toxins people were exposed to where levels peaked around that time — leaded gasoline, early food contact plastics with unsafe additives, pesticides that are now banned, etc. But thanks Nancy Reagan. ;)
Theres huge uncertainty and layered assumptions in all of microbiology and biochemistry about how exactly things work on small scale. Because it is really hard to study live reactions in little things you can just barely see on an electron microscope.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
> The point is that people are drawing all sorts of unwarranted conclusions from this lay report on early stage research.
That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."
I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
although it's like milk too. exposure at an early age leads to the body producing more lactase enzyme to digest it. but lack of exposure often makes people lactose intolerant.
I certainly didn't; I simply quoted a sentence from the article. (I've noticed that some people have difficulty distinguishing between the person who quotes something and the person being quoted ... it might be a Sally-Anne effect.)
> It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
> nicotine is significantly more harmful than caffeine
“Significantly” is an opinion.
It’s more toxic by weight, yes.
Messes with vascular more than caffeine.
Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
> let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
Personally haven’t needed or wanted to use nicotine, but I have recovered from an array of chronic illnesses; I’ll get started on anything I please, thanks,
especially seeing how many of my peers are hopelessly exhausted and existing on abusive amounts of caffeine/prescription stimulants to get by.
assuming this is true, perhaps it's best to freeze sperm regularly with labels that way if you go off the deep end you can snapshot quite literally your best self? some possible times - right before college, right after college, after you meet someone you think you'd marry (but before you do), after marriage.
I think trying to "tune" your kids in any way is asking to be disappointed. My three kids could not be more different and they all have the same mother, grew up in the same house, etc.
If "microRNA" profiles have any influence, I would wager it's very small.
> they all have the same mother, grew up in the same house, etc.
I’m pretty sure the first one didn’t have siblings, and the second only had one. Also their mother is not the same person after raising the first kid, or raising two.
I’m a twin - admittedly boy/girl, so already with some fundamental differences - and we are very, very different people. Always have been. Different interests, different ways of seeing the world, different attitudes to competition, sports, social relationships etc.
Now I’ve got 2 boys, and even at fairly young ages they were very different. I’d say by 6 months old the basics of their personalities were visible, and they haven’t changed vastly as they’ve grown.
The twins I have known are the same. I would assume it has something to do with a desire to differentiate themselves from one another, but they always seemed far more dissimilar in personality and affect than my siblings.
OTOH could be siblings tend to be more similar as the smaller ones try to copy the older ones (my son would dress up as a ballerina to play with his sister when he was little, my smaller brother would acquiesce to play chess with me just to spend time together etc).
I have given up trying to explain child development, there's just too many variables.
Agree, those are some environmental differences. But any "microRNA" profile I might have contributed to the conception of each would be broadly similar. My life was pretty stable and levels of stress, diet, exercise, etc. were all about the same for all three.
If my quicksave/quickload savescumming is to be observed, I’d be pining for that sperm from before I told the waitress “you too” wrt to her telling me to enjoy my meal.
> I told the waitress “you too” wrt to her telling me to enjoy my meal.
That's not too bad unless you are in a group and they make fun of you right away, but it's a fumble that you can fix and start a good play if you don't just get super nervous.
Laugh it off, ask her if it's not the first one, ask her to join, even if you know she's actually working and can't.
I've never done any improv, but it seems like something maybe everyone should do so we all can avoid awkward moments that stick for way longer than they should.
Slang term for frequently reloading game state from recent save when a non-ideal outcome occurs. E.g. this method can be used to collect rare outcomes from a RNG-based game event.
Makes me wonder if that's some of the influence that different siblings get? The first born gets more ambition, the middle child chills, and the baby acts like a boomer.
Insulting yourself might have been your intent, but what you wrote is just a general ageist insult. It's like you when you fail something, and you make a racist analogy. You might want to insult yourself, you might think you are insulting yourself, but you are just racist.
It was a self-deprecating joke which back-fired because nuance is lost on the internet. You got triggered, which is entirely human, but at this point, you're the one who is doubling down. Perhaps it's a good time to disconnect and enjoy some time with your family.
I didn't "down" in the first place, but "no you" is typical of your ilk. Your comment is dishonest denial of your ageist bigotry, an inability to take responsibility for your actions. And I don't take life advice from trolls, bigots, and the like.
I get that saying “boomer ruined the world for all the generations afterwards” is an insult, but the word itself is now considered an insult?
Genuinely asking here; the constantly shifting landscape of what one is allowed to say when talking to US Americans is a bit hard for me to navigate and I currently only have online discourse as guidepost (which is like 1000% more toxic)
Your question is disingenuous, as the word "boomer" didn't appear isolated with no context. The statement was "the baby acts like a boomer", which clearly has a pejorative connotation--you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here? The babies/third children?" ... it's not even possible to think that babies are being insulted without thinking that saying they're like boomers is insulting. As I said, that seems to be an unquestioned assumption.
As I said elsewhere, there is no single way that boomers behave. Boomers are simply people born in the post-war boom, from 1946-1964, and they display a huge range of traits. Virtually all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative--ageist bigotry.
> what one is allowed to say
This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
queue rationalist fathers microdosing nicotine patches before conception to give their kids the best chance at abusing drugs.
"Hard headed", "not a cheap date", "not a lightweight"? Hard to say if increased tolerance is good or bad (especially if we're uncertain about how addictiveness/susceptibility to addictive behavior it passed)
Damn. I didn't start substance abuse until after all my children were sired. Apparently I have done them an injustice by compromising their resistance to cocaine and other toxins. I have failed as a father!
In the article, there's a link in the text right before they put that parenthetical. I'm guessing they're saying that the link interested them so they clicked it to read but opened it in a new tab so they could finish the current article first.
Someone who works out every day will obviously have different metabolic and microRNA profiles; assuming that line of research holds up and those biomolecular profiles make it into the zygote, survive many replication cycles, and act as developmental signalling molecules affecting gene expression during embryonic and fetal development, there could be life-long effects.
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.
For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
> Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed.
While there is absolutely no conclusive evidence, there are a few studies that indicate this is a possibility.
But if, evolutionarily, there are only 20 common recurring threats that you need to fear (but each comes at some kind of cost, like you won't hunt in an area that would otherwise provide food), it would make sense to pass on those fears in a generational way. So the possible things come from a preset list that has evolved over millions of years, that recur over and over but only in specific times and places.
We know that severe stress (such as trauma) leaves chemical marks on the genes, potentially passed down to the offspring. For example, this paper writes about an “accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5977074/
Though “lived experience” can encompass a lot of things, it definitely encompasses severe stress.
For example, constantly worrying about money because you’re poor can definitely put you under severe stress. Also, growing up without secure attachment to your caretakers, being asked to do role reversal (having to take care of your parents as a child), things like that will generate complex PTSD.
The comment you’re replying to suggests “lived experience” is too broad, not too narrow. The issue isn’t that it fails to include your example. It fails to exclude other things. Part of my lived experience today was seeing a manatee. It is unlikely this will be passed on.
It feels so wonderfully weird reading about some else seeing a manatee today. I too saw a manatee while walking with my kids today. The interesting part was our navigational strategies complementing each other (me – misremembering the details of a road closure, and them - getting curious about what a bunch of people at a marina are looking at) to find a group of manatees in a place we didn’t know they can be found.
And the comment you’re replying to suggests that since many lived experiences are plausibly heritable, the term is appropriate. In any case, the context in which it is actually used in the article seems beyond all but the most pedantic reproach:
>The first is how a father’s body physically encodes lived experience, such as stress, diet, exercise or nicotine use
And that’s a single sentence partway through the article. From the beginning, the refrain is the list of the sorts of things that seem to have heritable effect, not the phrase “lived experiences”.
>Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children
>Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring
Etc.
The article is clearly not attempting to suggest that all experiences are heritable.
A lot of this is transmitted via the language. The stories we form as a result of events in our lives, have power to set our values in all areas. These myths of the self, have what is essentially a value manifest for someone. And these myths, can be so strongly held that it will influence the person and family’s moods, actions, habits.
What is important is to note that there are many formulas for consciousness. Some are truely bonkers, some are just fundamental truth. And some… have yet to be discovered.
Permutations and combinatorics create a hyperspace of all ridiculous things!
> The authors pointed out “there are significant drawbacks in the existing human literature” including “lack of longitudinal studies, methodological heterogeneity, selection of tissue type, and the influence of developmental stage and trauma type on methylation outcomes”
The literature in this area is a mess, has become highly politicized. I’d give it another 10 or so years before I made any strong statements about these effects in humans. Famously the study of Holocaust survivors’ descendants didn’t show transgenerational effects.
You know, evolution people are some of the most confident bullshitters ever.
They like to tell people that if you don’t believe their theory, then you don’t believe science.
For such a long time they made fun of Lamarckian ideas as totally discredited, then once in a while stuff like this gets published and the scientists quoted say “we still don’t know how” it happens. Yeah but the orthodoxy is sure it can’t happen in any way than their theories say.
“Epigenetics” has become a socially safe word to acknowledge that “random” mutation and natural selection doesn’t explain everything. (That word “natural” is doing a lot of work there, by the way.)
The biggest thing is conflating all the theories under “evolution” as a catch-all term. The theory of common descent has a lot of evidence (like the phylogenic tree matching radiocarbon dating) so “evolution fans” latch on to that to literally shame anyone for eg questioning that ALL speciation happens by random mutation and natural selection. Regardless of any mathematical arguments, irreducibility arguments etc.
They’re like the bitcoin maxis of science.
They love to embrace “just-so” stories with no proof, as long as the story plausibly explains how a particular feature or phenomenon came about while sticking to ONLY random mutation and natural selection, they favor it.
Some of them even go so far as to say that ABIOGENESIS is happening on other planets and just throw a ton of time and planets at the problem. Keep in mind that abiogenesis requires reproduction, and the Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest replicating cell that can randomly mutate and reproduce for natural selection is astronomically high. But no matter. They will postulate proimordial soups with buckyballs, RNA world theories, etc. Just throw enough time and planets at it.
And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the anthropic principle and postulate a multiverse with as many worlds as we need to explain fine-tuning of the universe! So things are the way they are because we are here to observe them.
This is not science, people. This is a mindset. It would rather uncritically propagate “just-so” storiess with zero evidence for them, than look for actual alternative explanations. “It’s the best we can do”, they always say.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t weaponize this approach for decades to drive people out of academia or make sure they don’t get published if they question the orthodoxy.
PS: While the critique above says NOTHING about intelligent design, proponents of some kind of intelligent design have faced a frustrating sleight of hand for years. While they were derided for having a “god of the gaps” for their bias, a different bias went entirely unnoticed on the other side with the word “natural” in natural selection:
Any newly discovered mechanism can be absorbed retroactively as “natural”
But design-like explanations are excluded even if they would explain the data more compactly
This is not because they were tested and failed — but because they violate the methodological rule.
So the theory becomes:
“Whatever happened, happened naturally — and we define ‘natural’ as whatever happened.”
I always find it fascinating when science catches up to the Bible.
The Bible clearly articulates some form of generational “pass-through” for the sins of the father passing to the children.
While I do think it largely refers to a spiritual judgement, it’s hard to ignore the real-world examples of abuse that always seem to repeat themselves without a huge effort on the part of, someone, usually the child after they’ve grown up, to break the cycle.
Source: I’ve seen a lot of brokenness in our country’s foster system.
Prior to them, I didnt think that behaviour or traits are inheritable.
When one of them was aronud 3 or 3.5, I observed an interesting behaviour:
It was about the meal, which contained fries - and ketchup.
He saw that the ketchup was flowing slowly towards the fries and reached there finally - he became funnily hectict, trying to prevent even more ketchup touching the fries.
Today I think he behaved that way ... because ... on my plate which fries & ketchup ... if this happens ... then ... you know :-D :-D :-D :-D
It drives me nuts, really - if I am at a restaurant, I ask always for separte plates for things which are fried, because I love the crust and it gets destroyed if any type of gravy is scattered around the plate :-D
Or maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-D
But what I can clearly see, is: In their body shape I can see that their mother and I were super-fit-in-shape when they were "created".
You mean that we showed them already by that age to not mix fries & ketchup? :-D
If children are that small and you are sitting with two of them at the table, handing over those ideas to them in a "nurturing way" is the last thing on what you can focus on with two small kids at the table :-))
And its always great if someone gives a downvote here if you share some personal life stories :-D
I can imagine how difficult it would be to differentiate between nature and nurture in such human observations. An exercising vs smoking parent affects the child because of his RNA or his behaviour? Identical twins studies have their limitations in number of participants.
"researchers, including those spearheading the work, are cautious about overselling their results"
Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
I write this here because science does not really work well when it is based on speculation. So this article is weird. It starts by speculating about something rather than analyse the article. It then continues to "textbooks have to be rewritten". Well, I think if you are in science, you need to demonstrate that all your claims made need to be correct - and others can verify it, without any restriction whatsoever.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,” Conine said.
So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
> So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
I hard disagree. Your comment to me reads as if a paper should either prove a new theory or disprove an existing theory.
However, publishing new results without a clear understanding of how it works is just as valid and this seems to be that. In Phsyics and Astronomy, new observations are often published without a theory of how it works. This is not a bad thing, that is part of the collaborative nature of science. The same holds true for papers suggesting a new theory, but lacking either observational or theoretical proof.
These flaws aren't failings of the article, but univeral to science, knowledge, and human endeavor:
> Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
This describes all science and all knowledge; if that's not good enough, nothing is good enough. Everything somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect; the best stuff is much more of the former. Newton's Laws are mostly correct, somewhat incorrect.
> science does not really work well when it is based on speculation
Speculation is the foundation of science: it leads to an hypothesis, which leads to research, which leads to more speculation.
> their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
That also is the nature of all science. For example, papers include analyses of their own blind spots and weaknesses, and end with suggestions for further research by others.
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
That's also part of science and all human endeavor. If you disallow that, we might as well go back to being illiterate - everything we read is flawed, and inevitably some is wrong.
There is plenty of room in science for research that is just to examine and collect data. I don't understand your argument that science should only be to demonstrate claims and "completing" theories. Is science not about experimenting to slowly form a more complete understanding about how our world works? Research that does little more than collect novel data and show probable correlations is still extremely valuable.
Detecting an effect is present is separate from effect power and mechanism. Showing an effect is present is usually the first step before the other two.
> Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
I don't understand your criticism.
It makes complete sense that the researchers are worried about the research being oversold. It's routine for media to take a scientific finding and grossly exaggerate its impact, i.e. "New research proves you can exercise your way to a fit child" or whatever.
This is science, we don't know if anything is "correct." The more compelling the research, the more we can adjust our priors as to what is "correct."
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
There are also lots of examples where theories were later not shown to be wrong. What's your point?
Do you have an actual, concrete criticism of the methodology of the epigentic research in TFA, or are your just bloviating?
I guess this makes sense if you also consider the history of dog breeding. The best traits are always breed forward into future generations, those characteristics could be how athletic the dog is or how friendly the dog is.
From the perspective of an individual breeder, they cannot know how much of a trait is from DNA or not. It may be more likely to be DNA-driven if you can prove that the trait is durable over many generations, in different environments. At least, that is my guess.
Is this not the basis of epigenetics? Don’t we already have human-based examples?
While I don’t recall the details there was an example of how starvation (of eventual parents) during WW II impacted the children. There is also, a similar example of how the effects of diet was passed along during The Great Depression.
I think its interesting that in the "rationalist" latter half of the 20th century Freud began to be dismissed at least in part on account of his elective affinity with Lamarck; now, it is clear that certain environmental and social factors have an influence on offspring at the genomic level from both parents.
Lamarckian vs. Mendelian genetics was about heritable traits being acquired in life (Lamarck), or being discrete units passed down at conception (Mendel).
Genetics is almost entirely Mendelian, but some of epigenetics is durable and thus Lamarckian.
There's also retroviral integrations, transposons, and all sorts of other complexities that don't fit neatly into boxes.
Interesting about the epigenetics, transposons, and other DNA augmentations…
These are all fundamentally a story of how the individual encounters and uses information in their lived experience. But there is also a very strong consensus narrative that must be respected, but also challenged and evolved. DNA is literally the informational substrate of a life… when you adopt a personal belief, or are subject to someone elses, you have the ability to help but also harm your informational substrate. Tend your garden of ideas with love and care.
Not just epigenetics, cells (and probably organisms) have mechanisms to induce mutations at elevated rates (e.g. E. Coli lacZ mutation under pressure). I wouldn't be surprised if nervous systems are elegantly wired to both epigentic and mutagenic levers to accelerate evolution through stimulus guided modifications rather than just raw survival/selection.
The dirty little secret is that there is an incredible ideological incentive for many for Lamarckianism to be true so that they can blame “lived experience” for every ill in the world. Retroviruses, transposons, etc do not have that specific property and thus you see far fewer articles extolling their purported impacts.
> “It’s still very hand-wavy,” said the epigeneticist Colin Conine (opens a new tab) of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia
okay, I trust this article and source more
where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
Another example of "evolution" being deprecated in favor of "backpropagation" and the result is an evolution towards a holistic intelligence, to which everything contributes?
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
> evidence keeps piling up. Most recently, in November 2025, a comprehensive paper (opens a new tab) published in Cell Metabolism traced the downstream molecular effects of a father mouse’s exercise regimen on sperm microRNAs that target genes “critical for mitochondrial function and metabolic control” in a developing embryo. The researchers found many of those same RNAs overexpressed in the sperm of well-exercised human men.
https://www.cell.com/cell-metabolism/fulltext/S1550-4131(25)...
And as an epigeneticist says in the article, we have no idea how RNA is having the effects its having.
As I said, I'm happy to wait until we have moved beyond this early stage of research before making any radical inferences.
It doesn't, but the article doesn't go into this detail, so people unfamiliar with the field wouldn't understand why. The keyword is epigenetics. I.e. how certain genes become activated or deactivated through behaviour and/or environmental influences. But the DNA sequence itself remains unaltered. So no evolution necessary. There are basically a bunch of molecules than sit on top of your DNA that regulate gene expression. They don't just tell a cell to behave like a skin cell or a brain cell, they also regulate the entire cellular metabolism. The discovery that male sperm can also transmit this epigenetic information to offspring is relatively new, but now that we know that, it makes total sense that these gene-expression-modifying behaviours in fathers could affect their children. After all, they simply get to start with a good (or bad) bunch of epigenetic markers. They will not persist across many generations though, so it has no real long term effect on evolution. It may even be an evolved mechanism that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes on timeframes that would be prohibited by evolution.
It is pretty accurate, even if we don't understand all details yet. Here's a review article of the current research that's not from a popsci journalist: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-37820-2
Why not? Is there some tempering mechanism on epigenetic transfer? I could imagine that some sperm-conferred epigenetic markers could continue down the male descendants unbroken.
These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.
Also there are the very known costs of nicotine damaging sperms, or of course being in literal smoke as a child (or adult) and deal with those real effects.
But seriously though, "immune" is a humorous exaggeration, but I'm not sure we have data to rule out the idea that this cohort has increased tolerance to some environmental toxins.
So it's possible the level of harm we see today is already "post-" this protective effect, if any.
He means that the hippie generation and disco generation took a lot of drugs.
There were plenty of non-"drug" toxins people were exposed to where levels peaked around that time — leaded gasoline, early food contact plastics with unsafe additives, pesticides that are now banned, etc. But thanks Nancy Reagan. ;)
Allergies and cancer are way up.
There’s multiple causes behind those, this is almost certainly one.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
Not giving any opinion on this piece specifically but just saying there can be scientific value even if the details are hand-wavy.
That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."
I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
The only purpose mouse models serve is to fill the popular press with sensational findings and torture a lot of mice.
But a lot of life-saving medicaments and techniques started as mouse testings, including Penicillin, cancer drugs and the polio vaccine.
Nicotine is on-par with caffeine in isolation.
It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
I was surprised to learn nicotine is used by functional doctors to treat CFS-adjacent conditions, and the mechanisms therein.
I certainly didn't; I simply quoted a sentence from the article. (I've noticed that some people have difficulty distinguishing between the person who quotes something and the person being quoted ... it might be a Sally-Anne effect.)
> It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
Yes, which makes this article even less reliable.
let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
“Significantly” is an opinion.
It’s more toxic by weight, yes.
Messes with vascular more than caffeine.
Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
> let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
Personally haven’t needed or wanted to use nicotine, but I have recovered from an array of chronic illnesses; I’ll get started on anything I please, thanks,
especially seeing how many of my peers are hopelessly exhausted and existing on abusive amounts of caffeine/prescription stimulants to get by.
seems like a neat premise for a sci fi novella.
Though I've never had nor wanted kids in the first place anyway.
If "microRNA" profiles have any influence, I would wager it's very small.
I’m pretty sure the first one didn’t have siblings, and the second only had one. Also their mother is not the same person after raising the first kid, or raising two.
Parenting never have reproducible conditions.
Now I’ve got 2 boys, and even at fairly young ages they were very different. I’d say by 6 months old the basics of their personalities were visible, and they haven’t changed vastly as they’ve grown.
I have given up trying to explain child development, there's just too many variables.
> No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man
Or your worst, since the article also suggests that bad habits can be epigenetically useful to the offspring.
I would hold off reaching any conclusions from this clickbait.
You can study those kids and compare them to the reported lifestyle of the parents at the time before their conception.
That's not too bad unless you are in a group and they make fun of you right away, but it's a fumble that you can fix and start a good play if you don't just get super nervous.
Laugh it off, ask her if it's not the first one, ask her to join, even if you know she's actually working and can't.
I've never done any improv, but it seems like something maybe everyone should do so we all can avoid awkward moments that stick for way longer than they should.
Savecumming?
jk.
Honestly, sounds like a great read!
I won't respond further.
In case you don't: "the baby acts like a boomer" is not insulting agaist third children, but it is casually ageist.
It is casually insulting, as in bringing a generally insulting framework into a different topic.
I get that saying “boomer ruined the world for all the generations afterwards” is an insult, but the word itself is now considered an insult?
Genuinely asking here; the constantly shifting landscape of what one is allowed to say when talking to US Americans is a bit hard for me to navigate and I currently only have online discourse as guidepost (which is like 1000% more toxic)
As I said elsewhere, there is no single way that boomers behave. Boomers are simply people born in the post-war boom, from 1946-1964, and they display a huge range of traits. Virtually all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative--ageist bigotry.
> what one is allowed to say
This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
I've said my piece and won't engage further.
queue rationalist fathers microdosing nicotine patches before conception to give their kids the best chance at abusing drugs.
I wound read it as “the drug has less effect” - so in that case you can better abuse these drugs if you are worse at “disarming” them I guess
what is this (opens new tab) phenomenon?!
Not without a new cult spin-off you don't!
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.
For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
While there is absolutely no conclusive evidence, there are a few studies that indicate this is a possibility.
One such study from 2013: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594
Again, there’s not strong proof- but at least plausible evidence.
Though “lived experience” can encompass a lot of things, it definitely encompasses severe stress.
For example, constantly worrying about money because you’re poor can definitely put you under severe stress. Also, growing up without secure attachment to your caretakers, being asked to do role reversal (having to take care of your parents as a child), things like that will generate complex PTSD.
>The first is how a father’s body physically encodes lived experience, such as stress, diet, exercise or nicotine use
And that’s a single sentence partway through the article. From the beginning, the refrain is the list of the sorts of things that seem to have heritable effect, not the phrase “lived experiences”.
>Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children
>Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring
Etc. The article is clearly not attempting to suggest that all experiences are heritable.
What is important is to note that there are many formulas for consciousness. Some are truely bonkers, some are just fundamental truth. And some… have yet to be discovered.
Permutations and combinatorics create a hyperspace of all ridiculous things!
The literature in this area is a mess, has become highly politicized. I’d give it another 10 or so years before I made any strong statements about these effects in humans. Famously the study of Holocaust survivors’ descendants didn’t show transgenerational effects.
I was taken aback to learn my dad did the exact same thing at my age!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
They like to tell people that if you don’t believe their theory, then you don’t believe science.
For such a long time they made fun of Lamarckian ideas as totally discredited, then once in a while stuff like this gets published and the scientists quoted say “we still don’t know how” it happens. Yeah but the orthodoxy is sure it can’t happen in any way than their theories say.
“Epigenetics” has become a socially safe word to acknowledge that “random” mutation and natural selection doesn’t explain everything. (That word “natural” is doing a lot of work there, by the way.)
The biggest thing is conflating all the theories under “evolution” as a catch-all term. The theory of common descent has a lot of evidence (like the phylogenic tree matching radiocarbon dating) so “evolution fans” latch on to that to literally shame anyone for eg questioning that ALL speciation happens by random mutation and natural selection. Regardless of any mathematical arguments, irreducibility arguments etc.
They’re like the bitcoin maxis of science.
They love to embrace “just-so” stories with no proof, as long as the story plausibly explains how a particular feature or phenomenon came about while sticking to ONLY random mutation and natural selection, they favor it.
Some of them even go so far as to say that ABIOGENESIS is happening on other planets and just throw a ton of time and planets at the problem. Keep in mind that abiogenesis requires reproduction, and the Kolmogorov complexity of the smallest replicating cell that can randomly mutate and reproduce for natural selection is astronomically high. But no matter. They will postulate proimordial soups with buckyballs, RNA world theories, etc. Just throw enough time and planets at it.
And if that doesn’t work, they’ll use the anthropic principle and postulate a multiverse with as many worlds as we need to explain fine-tuning of the universe! So things are the way they are because we are here to observe them.
This is not science, people. This is a mindset. It would rather uncritically propagate “just-so” storiess with zero evidence for them, than look for actual alternative explanations. “It’s the best we can do”, they always say.
It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t weaponize this approach for decades to drive people out of academia or make sure they don’t get published if they question the orthodoxy.
PS: While the critique above says NOTHING about intelligent design, proponents of some kind of intelligent design have faced a frustrating sleight of hand for years. While they were derided for having a “god of the gaps” for their bias, a different bias went entirely unnoticed on the other side with the word “natural” in natural selection:
Any newly discovered mechanism can be absorbed retroactively as “natural”
But design-like explanations are excluded even if they would explain the data more compactly
This is not because they were tested and failed — but because they violate the methodological rule.
So the theory becomes:
“Whatever happened, happened naturally — and we define ‘natural’ as whatever happened.”
That makes the term unfalsifiable in principle
Current criteria appear to be motility, morphology, and DNA attributes (fragmentation & integrity) [1], all mostly visual or physical assessments.
[1] https://vidafertility.com/en/best-sperm-selection/
The Bible clearly articulates some form of generational “pass-through” for the sins of the father passing to the children.
While I do think it largely refers to a spiritual judgement, it’s hard to ignore the real-world examples of abuse that always seem to repeat themselves without a huge effort on the part of, someone, usually the child after they’ve grown up, to break the cycle.
Source: I’ve seen a lot of brokenness in our country’s foster system.
Prior to them, I didnt think that behaviour or traits are inheritable.
When one of them was aronud 3 or 3.5, I observed an interesting behaviour: It was about the meal, which contained fries - and ketchup. He saw that the ketchup was flowing slowly towards the fries and reached there finally - he became funnily hectict, trying to prevent even more ketchup touching the fries.
Today I think he behaved that way ... because ... on my plate which fries & ketchup ... if this happens ... then ... you know :-D :-D :-D :-D It drives me nuts, really - if I am at a restaurant, I ask always for separte plates for things which are fried, because I love the crust and it gets destroyed if any type of gravy is scattered around the plate :-D
Or maybe my son just found out the same, and then there is no inheritance. Im fine with this as well. :-D
But what I can clearly see, is: In their body shape I can see that their mother and I were super-fit-in-shape when they were "created".
You mean that we showed them already by that age to not mix fries & ketchup? :-D If children are that small and you are sitting with two of them at the table, handing over those ideas to them in a "nurturing way" is the last thing on what you can focus on with two small kids at the table :-))
And its always great if someone gives a downvote here if you share some personal life stories :-D
Monkey see, monkey do. (No offence intended towards your child.)
Edit: apparently it was "I learned it by watching you!"
Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
I write this here because science does not really work well when it is based on speculation. So this article is weird. It starts by speculating about something rather than analyse the article. It then continues to "textbooks have to be rewritten". Well, I think if you are in science, you need to demonstrate that all your claims made need to be correct - and others can verify it, without any restriction whatsoever.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,” Conine said.
So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
See this article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258
It was later redacted - a total fabrication. A lie.
I hard disagree. Your comment to me reads as if a paper should either prove a new theory or disprove an existing theory.
However, publishing new results without a clear understanding of how it works is just as valid and this seems to be that. In Phsyics and Astronomy, new observations are often published without a theory of how it works. This is not a bad thing, that is part of the collaborative nature of science. The same holds true for papers suggesting a new theory, but lacking either observational or theoretical proof.
> Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
This describes all science and all knowledge; if that's not good enough, nothing is good enough. Everything somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect; the best stuff is much more of the former. Newton's Laws are mostly correct, somewhat incorrect.
> science does not really work well when it is based on speculation
Speculation is the foundation of science: it leads to an hypothesis, which leads to research, which leads to more speculation.
> their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
That also is the nature of all science. For example, papers include analyses of their own blind spots and weaknesses, and end with suggestions for further research by others.
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
That's also part of science and all human endeavor. If you disallow that, we might as well go back to being illiterate - everything we read is flawed, and inevitably some is wrong.
I don't understand your criticism.
It makes complete sense that the researchers are worried about the research being oversold. It's routine for media to take a scientific finding and grossly exaggerate its impact, i.e. "New research proves you can exercise your way to a fit child" or whatever.
This is science, we don't know if anything is "correct." The more compelling the research, the more we can adjust our priors as to what is "correct."
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
There are also lots of examples where theories were later not shown to be wrong. What's your point?
Do you have an actual, concrete criticism of the methodology of the epigentic research in TFA, or are your just bloviating?
While I don’t recall the details there was an example of how starvation (of eventual parents) during WW II impacted the children. There is also, a similar example of how the effects of diet was passed along during The Great Depression.
Lamarckian vs. Mendelian genetics was about heritable traits being acquired in life (Lamarck), or being discrete units passed down at conception (Mendel).
Genetics is almost entirely Mendelian, but some of epigenetics is durable and thus Lamarckian.
There's also retroviral integrations, transposons, and all sorts of other complexities that don't fit neatly into boxes.
These are all fundamentally a story of how the individual encounters and uses information in their lived experience. But there is also a very strong consensus narrative that must be respected, but also challenged and evolved. DNA is literally the informational substrate of a life… when you adopt a personal belief, or are subject to someone elses, you have the ability to help but also harm your informational substrate. Tend your garden of ideas with love and care.
okay, I trust this article and source more
where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
Quanta Magazine is great! They have a cool YouTube channel as well
IOW, a Large Life Model?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism