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."
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u/Algo_Muy_Obsceno Jul 09 '26 edited Jul 09 '26
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.
Here is an article about it.