Everyone and his dog want to be celebrities. Neuroscientists and geneticists are no exception. They want their 15 minutes of fame. They want to appear on television. They want to brag to their family members and friends. And if this necessitates a few shortcuts, a few bombastic, ill-founded counterfactual statements, well, that's what it takes. Fake it, till possibly one day you will make it.
I'm talking about epigenetics. I'm talking about neuroscience. I'm talking about the hubris and the immaturity that are hallmarks of these new professions, the professions that emerged in the younger generations and reflect fully their psychopathology.
My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited, and I'm a professor of psychology. I also have a PhD in physics, so I know how to do rigorous science and what is happening today in the field of epigenetics is not rigorous science.
I suggest that you also watch my video on behavioral evolutionary psychology and other such fads and fashions in the field of intellect.
But today I'm going to focus on the claims of intergenerational transmission of trauma via genes.
Generally, the fields of neuroscience and epigenetics and so on so forth suffer from a few serious methodological or philosophical methodological problems.
First of all, they rely on reductionism that is not always factual, counterfactual reductionism.
There's a search for a magic bullet, the alchemical formula, the single gene that gives rise to pathological gambling, or another gene that gives rise to narcissism and yet another gene that is the cause and the mother of anxiety and so on so forth.
By definition these are nonsensical quests. Anxiety, narcissism and even pathological gambling are not simple behaviors. They are compounded phenomena that involve multiple, hundreds, of cognitive, affective and other processes, some of which have nothing to do with the brain or with genetics and take place, for example, in the intestines.
So to reduce these super complex phenomena into a single gene or even an array of genes is, how to put it gently, magical thinking.
There's also the problem of reverse causality. What causes what?
For example, we know that there is a hereditary component in psychopathy, but we also know that psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder, involves brain abnormalities.
And yet it's an open question. What has caused what? Did a lifelong of psychopathy caused the changes in the brain? Or did the changes in the brain, structural and functional, lead to the emergence of psychopathy in the individual?
We don't know there's correlation, but correlation is not causation.
Extremely few of the studies in these fields and in medicine in general are randomized double-blind clinical trials, the golden standard of finding out things, discovering the truth.
Most of the studies are cohort or population studies, which literally make it impossible to isolate confounding factors, isolate multiple factors that may have the same outcome.
For example, if you eat healthy, your cardiovascular health is much better. But people who eat healthy diets, they also exercise. So which is it? The exercise or the healthy food? That's an example of problems with confounding factors.
The only way to find out the truth is to conduct what is known as randomized double-blind clinical trials, and no one is doing this mostly because of ethical constraints.
Let's take for example, the cornerstone of epigenetics.
Epigenetics is the belief that events in one's life can somehow be transmitted via your genes to your progeny, to your children.
So if you experience abuse and trauma, this would somehow alter the expression of your genes or even your genes, your DNA, and this would be transmitted to your children.
And one of the main mechanisms that is the, as I said, one of the methods that the whole field relies on is what is known as DNA methylation.
It's one of the methods that the epigenome uses to activate quiet genes. I'll discuss it in a minute.
DNA methylation generally adds a chemical mark to the DNA. Demethylation removes this chemical mark.
So methylation is marking the DNA somehow, branding it, and demethylation is reverting to the original pristine state.
The problem is that many, not all, but many DNA methylation marks or genes on genes are removed when the sperm and the egg unite.
When the sperm and the egg unite, most of the DNA, the bulk of the DNA, is reverted to its original, untouched, unadulterated, pristine form. Any methylation that has taken place during the lifespan is removed when an egg and a sperm joined together.
It is true that some genes rarely come through the stage of conception with the methylated marks intact, but that's a rare event.
So the whole story of your DNA changes when you're exposed to trauma. Your DNA is methylated, marked, branded when you are the prey to a predator or when you're being abused or whatever.
It's true, but these brands, these marks, these methylated groups in the DNA, they are not passed forward to your children. They are removed when the sperm and the egg meet each other and decide to have a child.
And that's one example of some claims in the field which are highly problematic and I'm being uncharacteristically charitable in my language today.
There have been multiple research studies that have demonstrated that methylation indeed does occur. The DNA does change when you're exposed to trauma. And that it imprints your genes within the cell even. It enters the cells.
Experiencing trauma changes not only neural pathways in your brain, but it to some extent alters the way your genes activate, the way your genes are expressed and sometimes renders quiet genes active.
Genes that have been silenced prior to the trauma are now suddenly speaking up and they're active.
And all these epigenetic effects are absolutely correct, absolutely true.
The problem is, of course, can they be passed forward to future generation? Is epigenetic, are epigenetic effects multigenerational?
That's where the debate starts.
And when we look at studies that claim that, yes, trauma can be passed forward multigenerationally via the genes.
We need to be extremely careful because when you go deep into these studies, you discover that they are flawed, they are bad signs, absolutely bad science, not pseudoscience, but bad science.
Okay, to understand the mechanism of transmission of emotional trauma, how it can transcend generation, first of all, we must make a distinction between the genome, that's the full DNA.
DNA is like a language, it's like a code that tells specific cells and so on and so forth how to create proteins which are crucial for the functioning of the cell and more broadly of the body.
So DNA is the user's manual, it contains algorithms and instructions for the generation and creation of proteins.
And when you put all the DNA together, every single cell in the human body has a full copy of the DNA. Imagine like a giant library compressed into a single cell, microscopic cell.
So when you put all this DNA together, it's called the genome.
But then there is the epigenome.
What's the difference between the genome and the epigenome?
Well, some scholars suggest that the genome is a kind of hardware, and the epigenome is the software.
There's a hardware which is all your genes, which is your cells, and so on, the mechanisms and the machinery that creates proteins, the proteins that build up your body ultimately.
This is the hardware and it is driven by the genome.
The genome, you can think of the genome as the operating system, but it's not a software operating system, but operating system that is hardwired or baked into the hardware.
And then there is the software. The software is the epigenome.
The software instructs the hardware, tells the hardware, which genes to activate, which genes to keep quiet or to silence, and how genes, generally speaking, should behave.
That is the epigenome. Every human being has a, every animal has a genome and an epigenome.
So the epigenome is changing all the time because the epigenome is reactive to environmental factors.
When you're exposed to chemicals, your epigenome changes. When you change your diet, your epigenome changes, especially if there are some deficiencies. When you're subjected to trauma and abuse, your epigenome changes.
Everything that's happening in your environment changes your epigenome, rewrites the software that tells the hardware how to operate.
In other words, your genome remains largely the same. There are mutations and so on, but largely the same.
Your epigenome, the software, changes all the time.
Think of it as a smartphone, which is the genome, and an app or a series of apps installed on the smartphone. This is the epigenome and these apps are constantly updated in the Apple Store or the Google Play. They're constantly applied because it's constant revisions, these revisions at the epigenetic level.
The effects environment keeps rewriting the instructions on which genes to express and activate and which genes should be deactivated and kept quiet and silent.
Now, there's a professor, her name is Rachel Yehuda. She's a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience of trauma in Mount Sinai, prestigious university hospital in New York.
Yehuda uncovered what she claims to be an epigenetic mark in Holocaust survivors as well as in their offspring.
She said that the offspring of Holocaust survivors are at a greater risk for mental health challenges and problems because their genes. The genes they have received from their parents have changed.
In other words, she says, if you were born to a Holocaust survivor, your mother or father gave you a gene which predisposes you to anxiety for example.
She studied a mere 32 survivors and their adult children in 2015 and she examined a specific gene known as the FKBP5 gene. It's linked to anxiety and a few other mental health issues.
And she said that the FKBP5 gene has been somehow changed or altered epigenetically in Holocaust survivors, and they passed it on to their children.
And she extracted DNA from blood samples, and she identified epigenetic changes in the same region of the gene in the survivors and in the children.
This is an example of methodologically flawed science.
Why?
There's not disputing that the genes that were passed on to the children by the Holocaust survivors, the Holocaust survivor parents, these genes were changed somehow.
The specific anxiety gene that is somehow linked to anxiety, the connection is not as strong as Yehuda claims, but okay, somehow connected to anxiety. This gene has been altered. A methylated group was added to it. There's a marker. There's like an X. X marks the gene. And the marked gene was transferred from the Holocaust surviving parent to the child.
Up to here, everything is true.
However, the fact that the children developed anxiety and depression and other mental health issues may have had something to do with the gene, but may have had something to do with the fact that Holocaust survivors themselves are clinically depressed and anxious, well above the general population.
In other words, if you grow up with a parent and the parent, the mother, the father, have been to Auschwitz. They experienced extreme trauma. And consequently, have been to Auschwitz. They experienced extreme trauma. And consequently, they are always depressed, always anxious, always overprotective, always insecure, and so on and so forth.
When you grow up with such a mother or such a father, you are likely to develop the same traits. You are likely to also be depressed, also be anxious, also be insecure, also be paranoid.
And there's no way to separate the effects of the gene, the alleged effects of the gene from the effects of the environment, of the upbringing, of the family, of the psychology of the parents.
The child of a Holocaust survivor, he is exposed to a parent with mental health issues. It is true that the same child may also possess a gene that has been somehow altered, methylated. It's all true.
But what Yehuda does not do and what renders the studies suspect and seriously flawed and bad science is that she does not separate the effects of the upbringing, the dysfunctional parenting, the mental illness of the parents and so on. She doesn't separate these from the alleged impacts and effects of the gene.
She doesn't do it because it's impossible to do.
In a subsequent study in 2020, Yehuda examined a larger cohort of subjects. And the size of the cohorts, the size of a population studied is a major problem because most of these studies rely on like 10 people.
I'm kidding you not. 11 people, 30 people. 30 people is big.
That's not serious. That's not a representative sample. That is not serious scholarship.
The same problem exists in psychology. That's why psychology is a pseudo-science.
This is not serious. You can't study 20 people and generalize for populations of millions. This is not how we do science. This is statistically problematic.
The level of significance is highly affected by such a limited self-selecting, may I add, sample.
The whole methodology is flawed in this, starting with the basics of constructing a sample which can tell us something about the population at large or the cohort we are studying.
And of course, the second problem is population studies are very, very problematic. They should not be trusted. They are wrong a lot of the time.
All the nutritional advice we receive is based usually on population studies and that's why nutritional advice changes time and again contradicting itself time and again because population and cohort studies are not serious. Only randomized clinical trials are serious.
And so Yehuda conducted in 2020 another population study with more than 32 people and she looked at variables such as sex and age of the parent during the Holocaust and she found that there were lower levels of DNA methylation in the aforementioned anxiety, so-called anxiety gene, in children whose mothers survive the Holocaust, then in other Jews whose parents did not experience the Holocaust.
There's no debate about this. There's no question that an extreme experience such as the Holocaust methylates the victim's DNA, changes the victim's brain as well.
There hasn't been a debate about this for decades.
The debate is about whether these changes, which are pretty minimal, the methylation of DNA is pretty minimal, whether these minimal changes in genes that allegedly are connected somehow to complex phenomena such as anxiety, where correlation is confused with causation, complete chaos, whether these alleged impacts of the minimally altered DNA are more important, more dominant, more determinant, than the clearly problematic family ambience and environment.
When you grow up with someone who has been to Auschwitz, your parent is mentally affected, very often mentally ill, depressed, anxious, it's a mess.
It's far more likely that the home environment affects the child. The home environment creates the anxiety and the depression in the offspring, not a single methylated element gene in the DNA that somehow is passed on to the offspring and is rumored, may I'm using the word rumored judiciously, to be connected to anxiety.
This is not serious science. This is magic. This is alchemy. That's not science.
Some studies linked reduced DNA methylation in the very same gene to an increased risk of disorders in adults, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, for example.
And the results suggest that the mother's trauma, even if it occurred during childhood, might lead to epigenetic changes within the DNA in her eggs. And this impacts the mental health of the children.
Again, there is no separation between the mental health impacts of the trauma on the mother, which she passes on to the children by becoming a dysfunctional mother, and her hereditary component, the genes passed on to the offspring.
And as long as we cannot separate these two, anything we say is nonsense. Not even pseudoscience. Pure, unadulterated, complete nonsense.
In 2019, there was a study with male Vietnam War veterans from Australia. And they found that there were methylation differences in the DNA that encapsulated in the sperm of veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.
They compared the DNA of these traumatized veterans with the DNA of people without post-traumatic stress disorder and they found that there were 10 regions of DNA that showed different methylation patterns in PTSD victims veterans compared to non-PTSD veterans.
And it is safe to say that PTSD and similar psychiatric disorders, trauma disorders, it's safe to say that they do change the methylation of DNA, including, of course, DNA encapsulated in sperm, because sperm contains DNA. Sperm is a DNA envelope. That's all it is. It's a courier delivering DNA.
So of course you would find the same methylation differences in the DNA in the sperm.
There's no debate about trauma causing methylation, methylation dictating a different expression of genes by, for example, reactivating silent genes or suppressing active genes. There's not debate about this.
The debate is about what, if at all, is the contribution of this methylation as it is passed down the generations. If it is passed down the generations, there's a debate about this as well, but if it is passed down, what is the contribution of this compared to the contribution of the environment?
Because when you grow up as a child and your father is a traumatized Vietnam veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, it would have an effect on you. It would change your mental health. It would inducing you anxiety and depression and paranoia. Even if your genes are perfectly okay.
So the question is, what's the contribution of the methylated gene? Is it 10%? Is it 50? Is it 90?
The problem with these scholars, I'm sorry, but I have to say so-called scholars, is that they pretend that the methylation of the DNA explains 100% of the mental health condition, ignoring the fact that growing up with Holocaust survivors and growing up with Vietnam veterans who have PTSD is a harrowing, horrible experience that is likely to traumatize the children, at least as much as any alleged gene.
Methylation pattern in vets with post-traumatic stress disorder were linked with mental health conditions diagnosed in the veterans' children according to the study, and that is where the study is bullshitting you. It was not linked to anything. It was correlated.
In other words, this methylated, marked, changed gene was found in the fathers, or Vietnam vets with PTSD, the same gene altered, changed, methylated, was found in the children. That much is true. And it was likely transmitted, genetically, was a hereditary transmission.
However, it is not true to say that it is the gene that causes the mental health conditions in the children. It might have been the exposure to a father who is mentally ill.
And to claim otherwise, as many of these studies do, is irresponsible. Absolutely irresponsible. It's bad science and gives science a bad name and feeds into all kinds of nonsensical conspiracy theories.
The findings of this particular study identified a unique pattern of DNA changes. These DNA changes can be inherited. They are not always inherited, by the way. There are scholars who say that in the vast majority of cases they're not inherited. But let us say that they can be inherited, okay? And let's even assume that they are associated with a stress response, whatever associated may mean. It's a very vague, ambiguous kind of field.
But let's assume that there is some association.
But don't you think it is stressful to grow up with a father who has PTSD because he served in Vietnam? Don't you think it is depressing to grow up with a mother who has survived Auschwitz, a Holocaust survivor? Do you think you need a gene for that? Can't it be more readily explained by exposure to parents whose mental health is compromised?
So I think we are better served by experiments with animals. Experiments with animals are more pure. The environment is supposed to play a more minimal role when animals raise their cubs or their pups or whatever. The environment plays a role, but it's more minimal than with human beings. Most of the information transmitted is genetic. Instincts and so on are genetically determined. Behaviors are largely genetically determined.
So, there have been experiments trying to understand how animals get to transmit information about ancestral trauma to offspring.
There are studies by Brian Dias, neuroscientist with Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, an associate professor in the University of Southern California's developmental neuroscience and neurogenetics program.
Dias exposed mice to a chemical. The chemical smelled like cherry blossoms. And then whenever the animal smelled the chemical, he cruelly and sadistically delivered a mild electric shock. That's what scientists do in secret in their laboratories. Okay, I'm just kidding.
Whenever the mouse smelled cherry blossoms, the chemical was released, and the mouse had this experience of smelling cherry blossoms, the mouse was exposed to a mild electric shock.
And naturally, conditioning, we've learned this in the theory of conditioning in behaviorism, the mice learned to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms. It started to associate the smell of cherry blossoms with pain and electricity.
The next two generations of mice startled when they smelled the same scent. They've never been exposed to the cherry blossom smell before. And yet, when the molecule was released into the cage, the children of these mice, the offspring of these mice, reacted as if they were electrically electrocuted when this was not the case.
Let me clarify. Mother mouse was exposed to the smell of cherry blossoms and whenever she smelled the cherry blossoms she was electrocuted. Mother mouse learned that cherry blossoms caused pain. The smell of cherry blossoms comes with pain.
So Mother Mouse was conditioned to be afraid of the smell of cherry blossoms. Then Mother Mouse replicated as mice do and she had offspring. She had children, so to speak, children mice.
These children were never exposed to an electrical shock. They never received electrical shock. But whenever they smelled cherry blossoms, they got terrified. They had a startled reaction, which is a post-traumatic reaction.
So it's as if they were electrocuted when they were not. The memory of the electrical shock seemed to have been transmitted from the mother to the children somehow, probably genetically.
What I don't know is if the mother was present when the children were exposed to the cherry blossom smell. If she was present, she might have conveyed fear through her body language and behavior and this infected the children. This part, I don't know. I couldn't find.
Dias later repeated the experiment with another chemical that smelled like almonds. Almonds, you know.
And this time the subgroup of mice experienced a combination of the smell of almonds with an electric shock.
So he divided the mice to two groups. One group experienced electrical shock when they smelled the almonds, and the other group didn't.
Later, the same mice were exposed to the odor, the smell without the shock.
This time, these mice did not interpret the smell as a threat, and their offspring were not afraid of the smell either.
So there are indications in these studies, interesting indications, that learned behaviors, because being afraid of an electrical shock is a learned behavior, associating the electrical shock with a specific smell, is a learned behavior.
It seems that these learned behaviors have been somehow passed to the next generations of mice who have never had the experience of an electrical shock.
If the mother were absent and the children reacted autonomously this way, it's a strong indication of epigenetic transmission of learned behaviors via genes.
Inheritance doesn't mean that the children will always show the same signs of trauma as the parent.
There were studies, the University of Zurich, a scholar by the name of Mansuy, she had investigated epigenetic effects caused by the separation of mice mothers and mice pups.
The mothers were exposed to stressors during the separation.
So there was a population of mice, mothers and children. She separated the mothers from the children and then subjected the mothers to stressors.
I told you that all scientists are sadists.
So how could a stressful environment such as a separation from the mother affect or set off epigenetic changes in pups?
And we don't know the answer.
Mansuy and others acknowledge that we don't have a mechanism. We don't know how stress and the epigenome in brain and other cells interact. We have not the faintest idea what's going on.
But the study did find that the pups, the children of the mother mouse and their descendants exhibited depression memory deficits and risk-taking behaviors they were unable to evaluate potential dangers. There were discernible behavioral changes in these mice. The mice, the pups, who were separated from the mother.
And these behaviors can be attributed to the stress of separation.
We don't need to, again, there is this, in my view, methodological flaw here, because separation itself is the stress.
To assume that exposure to the stress in the mother somehow communicates itself genetically to the pups is non-parsimonious. It's not a necessary assumption.
The very separation could have induced all these behavioral changes.
And there is no way we can separate the effects of the separation from the effects of the stress on genes.
And we also cannot explain how stress and why stress creates epigenetic changes and how are these transmitted.
It sounds a lot like magic or alchemy, not like serious science.
The depression and memory decline allegedly extended to the third generation and diminished, or ended, in the fifth generation.
And Mansuy herself says that, and I'm quoting, it's remarkable that some of these symptoms stay for so long.
Indeed it is.
The DNA methylation persists across five generations, no less.
It reminds me of the biblical injunction that the sons will pay for the sins of their fathers for 10 generations.
When the symptoms lessened, Mansuy found that the DNA methylation was altered in the male offspring, sperm and brain.
So there is some correlation between DNA methylation, the changes in the DNA, stress, and the conveyance of the transmission of stress to offspring.
The problem is there's no isolation of the environmental confounding factors, body language, other forms of transmission, the very trauma of separation, for example.
One early study in 2005 investigated whether exposure to some agricultural pesticide or fungicide or whatever could affect the sex of offspring in pregnant rats.
Answer, no, he did not.
However, when the male offspring turned about one-year-old, researchers noticed that a high percentage of these male children, the sperm cells of these male children, were dying.
So, while the fungicide, this chemical that was sprayed on crops and so on, did not affect sex selection, it did not alter the proportion between male and female children born. It affected the longevity and the viability and the mortality of the sperm in male descendants, in male offspring.
And the same thing happened to the next three generations.
And the fact is that only the pregnant mothers were exposed to the fungicide.
So somehow it seems that the exposure to the chemical altered or changed the mother's DNA.
But again, this is a tautology. Again, it's begging the, again it's wrong.
Because for example, the fungicide may have affected the mother's DNA, but it may also have affected the children's DNA in the womb. The child as an embryo may have been affected by the chemical.
We don't need to invent a complex mechanism where a chemical in the environment affects the genes of the mother and the genes of the mother are somehow transmitted to the embryo. Then the embryo grows up and these altered genes affect some parameters in the embryo's life and behavior.
We don't need this super complex mechanism. A much simpler explanation is that the exposure to the chemical somehow permeated the womb and affected the embryo directly, altering the embryo's DNA, creating mutations in effect.
So this is not necessarily non-genetic inheritance. The impact on the chemical on the embryo is another possible explanation and honestly far more likely.
Inevitably the guy who came up with this experiment, his name is Skinner, reminiscent of Skinner of behaviorism, is the founding director of the Center for Reproductive Biology at Washington State University.
DNA methylation has been observed in sperm. Epigenetic shifts in sperm have been observed, and these are carried on to the next generation. There's little debate about this.
The problem is to isolate these from the environmental impacts.
And another problem is they need to come up with very complex models of transmission when we have much simpler models.
If you grow up with a Holocaust survivor, her mental health issues are the simple explanation. And it's a much stronger explanation than a single gene, which has been affected by methylation and may have been passed or not or whatever.
There are much simpler explanations for all this. We don't need to invent an epigenetic shift to explain things.
If the mother, pregnant mother is exposed to a chemical, the chemical may have a direct impact on the embryo in the womb. There's no need to go through the mother's DNA.
It's all very, very unnecessarily complicated and defies the test of good science. Good science is parsimonious. It uses minimal entities, minimal number of entities, and a minimal number of assumptions. This is known as Occam's razor.
Skinner later tested rats' exposure to a herbicide called some kind of herbicide, never mind.
The chemical did not harm the rats and mysteriously had no impact on the first generation.
In other words, the pregnant mother was exposed to the chemical. She gave birth and the first generation of mice, mice pups or mice children, was not affected. Only the second generation was not affected.
Only the third and fourth generation, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of mother mouse displayed a higher incidence of prostate, kidney and ovarian disease along with obesity and birth abnormalities.
The sperm revealed alterations in the DNA methylation linked with higher incidence of these diseases.
Again, one possible mechanism of transmission is the mother passes on methylated DNA.
But if she did, if this were the mechanism, why did it have no effect on the first generation, on the second generation, on the children. It skipped one generation. Why did it skip one generation?
I mean a natural assumption would be that the maximum impact would be on the children, a lessened, mitigated impact on the grandchildren and great grandchildren.
He would see exactly the opposite effect.
Allegedly, the mother's DNA has been methylated by environmental factors such as chemicals. She passed on this methylated DNA to her children, but it had zero impact on them.
The first impact was observed in the great children.
This flies in the face of the very foundational idea of epigenetic transmission and epigenetic shifts.
Mansuy and her colleagues hypothesized that if you have an enriched environment, you could lessen trauma-associated behavior.
They conducted several experiments.
She placed adult mice that have been traumatized early in life into cages with many other mice and so there were wheels and there were toys and there was a maze and so some of the mice were traumatized and some of mice were not traumatized.
Compared to traumatized mice in a standard enclosure, traumatized mice who then lived in the more stimulating setting didn't show the symptoms of trauma behavior. Their offspring also didn't show it.
Now that's an interesting result.
She took traumatized mice. She exposed them to an environment which was rich and stimulating and fun. Toys, wheels, maze, and that reduced the trauma, it seems, and erased or demethylated the DNA, erased the methylation, so it was not passed on to future generations.
Mansuy saw differences in a specific receptor gene, and this receptor gene has been linked in previous studies to anxiety.
And she said that the enriched environment, the fun environment, somehow affected this specific receptor gene.
The epigenetic effects of trauma have been somehow corrected.
The study was confined to this single gene and Mansuy in starting I think in 2004 she started to expand it to additional genes and so and so forth.
There's a scholar by the name of Szyf. He also found that you could reverse the effects of DNA methylation in rats who were anxious because of poor maternal care.
Once these rats reached adulthood, Szyf injected the rats with a drug, specific drug, and observed the mice showing fewer signs of stress. They started behaving like animals, he says that they started behaving like animals that were not subjected to this kind of early life adversity.
The drug caused DNA demethylation or the removal of the tags, the marks. It's kind of hashtags, yeah.
And this gene was demethylated. And subsequently, stress behaviors and anxiety behaviors disappeared.
So clearly there is some correlation between methylation and demethylation and stress and anxiety.
But to generalize from this and to make the bold claims that these people make, it's laughable. It's so serious. It renders the whole enterprise suspect, honestly.
Some research suggests that even exercise can influence the epigenome.
This leads to another problem in epigenetics.
Okay, you've experienced the Holocaust as a child, let's say you were 10 years old you experienced the holocaust. And then you spend the next 70 years of your life in a loving, caring, empathic, compassionate, wonderful environment.
Allegedly, ostensibly, this should erase the trauma. It should demethylate your DNA.
And yet, it didn't. So can the environment reverse methylation or not?
Skinner studied 70 pairs of identical human twins who agreed to have their level of exercise monitored.
The more physically active twins experienced lower rates of obesity and metabolic disease, surprise, surprise.
But their epigenome also changed. The twins who exercised more had chemical tags on their genes linked to lower metabolic syndrome.
So Skinner says all environmental factors from toxicants to diet, to exercise, to climate change, impact health through epigenetics.
Well, if epigenetics is so easy to reverse, so malleable, so mutable, it's meaningless. Think about it for a minute. If absolutely everything can create methylation, and absolutely everything can reverse the methylation, then everything affects the DNA in ways which essentially cancel each other out.
If this process is so easy to reverse with exercise, then how meaningful can this process be and how persistent is it like you're a Holocaust survivor okay and then you became an Olympic contestant, an Olympic athlete. Why would your DNA not be demethylated? According to these studies, exercise reverses methylation, reverses the trauma. And yet, according to Yehuda studies, your experience at age 10 as a Holocaust survivors determines your DNA for life. They can't even agree among themselves. The whole thing, the whole issue of epigenetics, it seems to me that adverse experiences in the environment and beneficial experiences in the environment somehow mark the DNA, tag the DNA, somehow add information to the DNA regarding the environment, and that every subsequent event, every subsequent experience, every subsequent behavior event, remove these tags, add them back, and then remove them again.
It's not a persistent, consistent process. It's not something that can be passed on to children. It's there and then it's not there. It's ephemeral. It's fleeting. It's not something. It's not like DNA. DNA is fixed. The tags, the demethylated groups, the methalated groups, I'm sorry, the tags that are added to the DNA, the demethylated groups, the the methylated groups, I'm sorry, the tags that are added to the DNA, the way the DNA is marked, X marks the gene, these are passing, these are not fixed, these are not stable, this is not something that changes your DNA forever to the point that you have to pass it on to your children. While it's easy to focus on the negative aspects of potentially inheriting the effects of trauma, epigenetic changes help future generations. They activate genes that help the offspring, help the children to cope with adversity. Yehuda herself said the following. That's what I think happens, this ability to better cope with trauma and adversity. But it depends, she says. If you're not living in adversity, you might become hypervigilant. And if you're living in adversity, you might have the skill set to survive adversity that is honed from life lessons of the past somehow. We don't know enough. life lessons of the past somehow. We don't know enough. The technology of sequencing is exploding and we're going to have much better sequences very soon. We would be able to analyze specific types of cells and how they respond to stress. We are going perhaps to be able to enter the sperm and explore the very process of marking, tagging that occurs in the sperm. And we're going to discover how enduring these tags and marks are and how embryos bear the imprints of trauma and so on so forth. At this stage, this kind of studies only feed into the victimhood movements and the victimhood mindset. I'm a victim of my mother's trauma. It's not my fault. And I'm here to tell you that we are very, very far from understanding epigenetic shifts and how they impact future generations. Any claim to the contrary is shalotanism, pure and simple and I don't care how many academic degrees the person who exclaims makes these claims is possesses.