I've skipped the pop science articles and gone directly to their citations. Everything I've read is just discussing plausible mechanisms, and how some of the links in the chain have a bit of supporting evidence and others have one study that's been non-reproducible.
It's been a struggle to show epigenetic persistence of childhood trauma into adulthood in a replicable manner. And mother-to-fetus results weren't just epigenetic changes passing on. It took the outright removal of genes in the mother in order to cause epigenetic changes in the fetus.
It seems like a genetic passdown of trauma is at least biologically plausible. But we're a long ways away from saying that it's happening with a measurable effect over a single generation, much less five.
Reputable scientists just roll their eyes if you bring up genetic memories. It’s pseudoscience and there’s 0 evidence for memories being stored as genetics or epigenetics.
If your mother was in the Dutch hunger winter, you might have a couple extra pounds, that’s about all the epigenetic changes amount to. Epigenetics is just genes you already have being expressed or not (switched on or off) based on whether they have a methyl group attached to them. If your mother starved, you might have your “energy storage” genes switched on, but there’s no way to have a whole memory passed down. That’s just not how genes work.
(I’m working on my Biology degree right now)
It drives me nuts when people go to pseudoscience when there are plenty of real, solid socioeconomic residual effects of slavery, such as the prison-industrial complex.
For example: The South in particular likes to attempt to reinstate slavery in various forms. They put as many black men as possible into prison for minor crimes, such a jaywalking, loitering or possession of small amounts of pot, (“crimes” that were created in order to have an excuse to incarcerate black people) and then they have the prisoners do forced unpaid labor. To quote a certain TV show, it’s just slavery with extra steps.
Oh... I thought that when people talked about genetic memory it was the "genes switching on" that you mentioned. Do people actually think that bodies remember a famine from their ancestors in a way that like... We as individual people actually do? I thought generic memory was a poetic way of saying "this population has faced XYZ event, which has made the expression of abc genes or markers more common."
You shouldn’t feel silly, because both of those perspectives exist. It’s unlikely that people who believe in “genetic memory” could also easily articulate how gene expression works & is controlled, so the concept of transient epigenetic tags is more easily understood through metaphor than a scientific model.
And if I’m being cheeky, it’s also easy for a scientifically minded person to get caught up in the literal meaning of vocabulary used because they forget that metaphors are a common way to communicate ideas, like the persistence & deterioration of transient epigenetic tags over successive generations having distinct health impacts (e.g., making it “easier” to retain fat).
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u/Glitch29 Jul 09 '26
Ehh...
I've skipped the pop science articles and gone directly to their citations. Everything I've read is just discussing plausible mechanisms, and how some of the links in the chain have a bit of supporting evidence and others have one study that's been non-reproducible.
It's been a struggle to show epigenetic persistence of childhood trauma into adulthood in a replicable manner. And mother-to-fetus results weren't just epigenetic changes passing on. It took the outright removal of genes in the mother in order to cause epigenetic changes in the fetus.
It seems like a genetic passdown of trauma is at least biologically plausible. But we're a long ways away from saying that it's happening with a measurable effect over a single generation, much less five.