Whether it was "over-interpreted" or not -- some stressors methylate genes, and those mutations are passed on to descendants.
Does surviving the holocaust count as a stressor? Yes. Would going through that probably involve a bundle of stressors, of which some are likely to produce epigenetic mutations? Likely.
The author of this article is in the business of writing papers that are anti-trans-generational epigenetic inheritance. The author either doesn't believe it is possible, or doesn't believe to have seen evidence for it yet.
It's a useful counterpoint to the majority opinion, tho it's very much the opinion of someone peddling a particular line that happens to be the line their in the business of writing papers about.
The most interesting thing in this study was that the descendants of those who had experienced the holocaust seemed to have become more immune to the stressors their ancestors faced. That's a pretty clear case of the genome responding by becoming more fit, the occurrence of which has evolutionary advantage.
> Does surviving the holocaust count as a stressor? Yes. Would going through that probably involve a bundle of stressors, of which some are likely to produce epigenetic mutations? Likely.
So because the conclusion of the original study is probably sort-of-maybe okay-ish, we can excuse the shoddy research that was performed to get to that conclusion? I don't think that's how science works.
The final paragraph of the post reads
> Every week there are uninterpretable epigenetics studies published, the Holocaust study is merely one of many, these authors are merely following prevailing beliefs in over-interpreting their data. However, every such study damages the ‘brand’ of epigenetics a little more. If we want human disease epigenetics to be sustainable as a field of research, we have got to start to do substantially better in designing, executing, interpreting, reviewing and funding these studies.
Being afraid that bad research might damage the reputation of the entire field of epigenetics doesn't seem like something I'd worry about too much if I didn't believe in epigenetics as a valid object of scientific study.
That's not a question based in science. It's not about beliefs, it's about evidence.
Speaking for myself, I've taken a strong interest in epigenetics due to my own health experiences and general curiosity. I find some of the hypotheses around epigenetics to be compelling, including that of generational inheritance of trauma, which is at issue here. But hard data is lacking, and I hope to see more rigorous studies that produce more solid evidence that can enable us to better understand the issue.
Someone who hasn't heavily researched epigenetics or any other topic is perfectly entitled to take the null hypothesis position and demand better evidence before adopting a different position.
Well, i used believing in a relaxed fashion. I'm working on a really huge epigenetics consortium, and I think there's a growing set of evidence for neo-Lamarckism.
The original article is using a sample group which is just much too small to make any reasonable statistical correlation, and in it's conclusion is making claims about causation without even being able to prove correlation.
I would suggest a change to your first sentence: "some stressors methylate genes, and those same genes may be methylated in descendants."
It is not a "mutation", at least not in the sense of a stable and heritable gene change. DNA methylation can be reversed, hence it is considered an epigenetic change, rather than a genetic change. The controversy over epigenetics seems to be about how long an epigenetic change can remain in a series of offspring, and how much of an impact an epigenetic change can have on the genetic material, the only long-term mechanism of heredity that we know of.
There are good reasons to not think trans-generational epigenetic inheritance is possible though. The main piece of evidence is the reprogramming that occurs after fertilization where epigenetic marks are erased and re-established.
You could maybe argue that that epigenetic machinery was transferred trans-generationally during cell division to help in re-establishing specific epigenetic marks, but that's not really an "informational" inheritance.
I wonder what an similar survey of the genetics of Palestinians living under occupation for five decades would show - and whether the epigenetic effect not only makes people more "fit" for dealing with trauma, but perhaps desensitised when it comes to inflicting trauma on others.
How did you measure the suffering ? If you just guesstimate the magnitude of the suffering I try a guesstimation too: In my opinion 4.5 years of intense suffering are in the same order of magnitude with 45 years of not so intense suffering. Unless some suffering is way more important than other suffering. I don't know.
Depends on scale, 3x or 100x both fail the 4.5 to 45 test.
PS: The reality is it's mostly propaganda right now, if things where as bad as generally portrayed you would see a lot of immigration. (ex: syrian refugees)
What evidence are you basing your reality on? Have you been there? Is there some on-the-ground reporting you trust that presents that view? Or are you only extrapolating from the relative lack of refugees? If so, there are lots of potential confounding variables, the most obvious being the relative tightness of borders in different areas.
You might also count the % or # of non-combatant population that was intentionally killed.
I also think that if palestinians were really suffering, they would agree to the terms offered to them. Repeatedly. The fact that they keep refusing to live in peace shows that things aren't all that bad.
Not really. That's called losing a war. In most cases, when a war is lost, one side agrees to the terms they would probably deem unfavorable before the war had started. That's why we say they 'lost' the war.
I think there are few if any post-WWII wars that works like your idealized model of war. Most of them have been very assymetric from the start, such that one state's population hardly has it's 'conditions' touched at all while another's way of life is completely destroyed -- but that doesn't mean the more powerful actor always 'wins'.
For instance, did the US 'lose' the Vietnam war, because the Vietnamese somehow made conditions in the U.S so horrible that the U.S. had to "agree to terms they would deem unfavorable before the war"? It just doesn't make sense to even try to frame it that way.
How about the U.S. in Iraq or Afghanistan, did one side 'win' because they made life so miserable for the other side that they were willing to accept conditions they would have seen as 'unfavorable' at the beginning? The question doesn't even make sense, it's got nothing to do with what happened. And indeed, it could be argued that the worse U.S. forces made the lives of Iraqis, the more resistance to U.S. forces there was, it got the U.S. no closer to 'victory' to immiserate Iraqis.
Let alone wars against 'internal enemies', which if you insist on framing the Israeli/Palestinian conflict as a war, it clearly is. Did hostilities between the UK government and the IRA cease because one side made the other so miserable they had to agree to terms they would have considered 'unfavorable' before? Again, it doesn't even make sense to frame it that way. If anything, the reverse, the Irish were no longer nearly as discriminated against or as subject to military occupation as they had been earlier in the conflict, and this in fact was pertinent in cessation of hostilities.
Subsequent conflicts are simply an extension of the same one - one side's unwillingness to accept Israel's existence.
The territories in question are occupied because they were lost in the war of 1967. Had there not been that war (effectively started by the arab states), Israel would not have taken over the Egyptian / Jordanian lands (which never had a Palestinian state there).
And meanwhile, what is it you actually want the actual people living in the occupied territories, 2, 3, 4 generations on, to actually DO? They should acquiesce to living without civil or human rights indefinitely, because some nation-states of the purported same ethnicity as them (which have never treated the Palestinians well either) lost a war 50 years ago? (it's debatable who 'started' that war, but it doesn't really matter)
People living under that kind of repression have always resisted, throughout history. Always will. You probably would too.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with the OP really, or HN.
Given that palestinians don't really have a functioning democracy, it's hard to say what the actual people 'can do'.
However - we can look at opinion polls for ideas. Right now majority of palestinians support waging a war with Israel:
"“A majority of 74 percent favors Hamas way of resisting occupation. … Furthermore, 56 percent favor the transfer of Hamas’ armed approach to the West Bank and 40 percent oppose that,” the center noted."
I fully accept that it's not an ideal solution for majority of Palestinians who would prefer Israel to disappear altogether.
PS I agree that this has nothing to do with OP or HN - but any discussion of Jews (or Holocaust) turns to 'but what about the Palestinians'. C'est la vie.
> However, the Prime Minister's Office said the document was a U.S. proposal that Israel had never accepted. "At no point did Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agree to withdraw to 1967 lines, divide Jerusalem or recognize the Palestinian right of return. That was and remains his position," Netanyahu's office told Yedioth Ahronoth.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.645676
We're getting into the nitty-gritty of he said-she said, leaks, etc. Maybe after a secret proposal is rejected, Israelis can not admit having proposed those things (since in the next round of negotiations, that will be the starting position that must be improved on).
The point is that there are proposals put on the table regularly. They probably do not include all things Palestinians want (Jerusalem, right of return) - but they never will. So all they have is sitting with nothing in relative squalor while waiting for a city upon a hill.
Parent comment asked me what I would do in their shoes - I'd say 'Ok, fuck this, I'll take what I can and build a life out of it - because otherwise my grandchildren will live in the same conditions'.
apply your self ( most valuable asset,
since that has yielded you success so far )
to learning MVC, and maybe Reactive or single direction of data flow architecture.
here's the kicker: only learn so much that you know a little more than the other guys in the companies doing web forms, and then
market yourself as the guy
who knows the legacy code base, knows the organizational in
and outs, knows the systems, and who's going to help transition them to MVC ( and newer tech )
so you're a guy ( or gal ) with little experience in MVC teaching folks with no experience in MVC, how to transition to MVC.
this is a niche, and you'd be perfect
for it.
it'll be stimulating as there is the conceptual challenge of bridging the two realms, the satisfaction of using your extensive experience, and the excitement of growing yourself into something new.
i'm excited for you. not many people will be able to be at the right place and the right time to do this. and it sounds like, with a bit of results, this could spin into your own consulting or dev shop serving this technical debt.
this path works and the future is bright for people like you.
This does sound like a path, and like I mentioned in another post, it'd be easy to take an opensource webforms project and convert it. I'll probably try that out soon.
> your entire post is a pretty damning conviction of yourself. I feel sorry for you.
Not really. I'm not substituting hating on others success and pretending it's "evil" as a substitute for actually taking responsibility, creating improvements and getting results.
That's what I'm pointing out critics of Amazon are deluding themselves with, and this attitude, the fake victim attitude, the I-don't-have-a-choice attitude, is fundamentally disempowering. It's the very cause of their purported disempowerment, and it's not going to help them achieve results, or create improvements -- leading them to have more things to complain about, which, unworkably, they blame on others.
> So true. There is certainly skill involved, one of them is almost certainly the ability and willingness to exploit your fellow human beings. I'm completely lacking in that skill so, woe is me, I will never make a billion. . .
If you want to pretend you’re the noble righteous fake victim of other’s exploitations, and if you want to pretend that people who are really successful are “evil” and their success is somehow fake as it’s founded on exploiting people, you’re just suckling to the disempowering lie that so many people delude themselves with : instead of taking responsibility for your success, and believing, correctly, that it is about the choices you make, you look at the successful, choose jealously over inspiration, and instead of creating improvements to better your situation, you delude yourself with fabrications to diminish their success and make you feel better, closing the perceived gap between you lack of success and their success, not by taking real action that could create results for you, but by believing these lies for the fake pay off of pretending others are “wrong” and you are “right”.
It’s sad you fell back onto this fake victim delusion, instead of choosing to take responsibility for your life and create improvements that could lead to results for you. And it’s sad that you saw in my sincere words trolling, what’s triggered for you there is what you bring to it, and what’s triggered for you is your responsibility, it’s got nothing to do with me. Pretending it does is just being a fake victim, again, instead of taking responsibility.
> The original reduction was given by the well-known Cook-Levin theorem ...
That’s easy. The NTM is just a condensed representation of a DTM, and in each case, the machine encodes an algorithm for whatever NP problem you are working. “Guessing correctly” has no bearing on NP, and it’s not a scary or impossible property that it works for people to believe implies P == NP is false. “Guessing correctly” ( otherwise known as branching ) is simply a property of the NTM occupying more than one subsequent state. As long as you construct an algorithm such that the NTM branches on its guesses in P time ( or equivalently the DTM is P size), then you have the P time algorithm. Pretending a valid reason for P == NP being “widely believed to be false” because there would then exist “an NTM that supports guessing correctly as a primitive operation”, as if this should be somehow intuitively magical and impossible, is obfuscation, “guessing correctly” has nothing to do with NP and makes no problem harder or easier. “Guessing correctly” won’t make a shit algorithm good ( it’s not like an oracle in a quantum algorithm like Shor’s ), it’s just another way of describing a NTM. All you need to worry about is making that P time algorithm for some NP problem. Whether you want to implement that as a DTM or a NTM, is totally up to you. If it’s a P time algorithm it’s still a P time algorithm. I can make an EXP time algorithm in a NTM too if I like. “Guessing correctly” is not some magical speedup equivalent to P == NP. Too suggest that, or imply that, by suggesting that such a machine would somehow be magical is either the result of someone who doesn’t understand this, or someone who is choosing to obfuscate this. So either you don’t understand it, and you are pretending that you do. Or you do understand it and you are needlessly fabricating to try to argue for P !== NP, simply revealing how tenuous you fear the arguments are, and how deeply you lack any substantive ones that you must fabricate them. Your language is an attempt to obfuscate and incorrectly attempt to confuse people who don’t understand. If you really know this space, doing that is just balderdash. Well played.
Step 3. Talk to anyone you see, especially anyone in front of a blackboard writing equations, and ask them to Try your keyboard.
Forget product hunt. Forget online.
Hit the streets!
Rinse and repeat. Also try : Physics, Statistics, Biology, Chemistry ( avoid CompSci since there will be too many time wasting questions from "app experts" and people who want to "help you out". Ignore. )
You will have so much info by the end of this. Take a friend, and video or tape record what you can. At the very least, have your friend take notes. Deconstruct at the end of the day. Rinse and repeat.
I think he got a good point and if you are talking in person you can see the reaction to your product "live" and really capture the experience of your tester.
Heh, I was comparing that to a "create stuff, do and learn new things, screw normal life, I'd never fit in" mentality, which surprisingly a lot of people don't have. I wouldn't call all of them stupid, though. Stagnated, maybe?
Does surviving the holocaust count as a stressor? Yes. Would going through that probably involve a bundle of stressors, of which some are likely to produce epigenetic mutations? Likely.
The author of this article is in the business of writing papers that are anti-trans-generational epigenetic inheritance. The author either doesn't believe it is possible, or doesn't believe to have seen evidence for it yet.
It's a useful counterpoint to the majority opinion, tho it's very much the opinion of someone peddling a particular line that happens to be the line their in the business of writing papers about.
The most interesting thing in this study was that the descendants of those who had experienced the holocaust seemed to have become more immune to the stressors their ancestors faced. That's a pretty clear case of the genome responding by becoming more fit, the occurrence of which has evolutionary advantage.