Two Modes of Transgenerational Information Transmission
نویسنده
چکیده
The explosion of scientific results about epigenetic and other parental effects appears bewilderingly diverse. An important distinction helps to bring order to the data. Firstly, parents can detect adaptively-relevant information and transmit it to their offspring who rely on it to set a plastic phenotype adaptively. Secondly, adaptively-relevant information may be generated by a process of selection on a reliably transmitted parental effect. The distinction is particularly valuable in revealing two quite different ways in which human cultural transmission may operate.
منابع مشابه
Three epigenetic information channels and their different roles in evolution
There is increasing evidence for epigenetically mediated transgenerational inheritance across taxa. However, the evolutionary implications of such alternative mechanisms of inheritance remain unclear. Herein, we show that epigenetic mechanisms can serve two fundamentally different functions in transgenerational inheritance: (i) selection-based effects, which carry adaptive information in virtue...
متن کاملEpigenetic transgenerational effects of endocrine disruptors on male reproduction.
Endocrine-disrupting chemicals generally function as steroid receptor signaling antagonists or agonists that influence development to promote adult-onset disease. Exposure to the endocrine disruptors during the initiation of male reproductive tract development interferes with the normal hormonal signaling and formation of male reproductive organs. In particular, exposure to the endocrine disrup...
متن کاملEnvironmentally induced epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of sperm epimutations promote genetic mutations
A variety of environmental factors have been shown to induce the epigenetic transgenerational inheritance of disease and phenotypic variation. This involves the germline transmission of epigenetic information between generations. Exposure specific transgenerational sperm epimutations have been previously observed. The current study was designed to investigate the potential role genetic mutation...
متن کاملTransgenerational effect of infection in Plasmodium-infected mosquitoes.
Transgenerational effects of infection have a huge potential to influence the prevalence and intensity of infections in vectors and, by extension, disease epidemiology. These transgenerational effects may increase the fitness of offspring through the transfer of protective immune factors. Alternatively, however, infected mothers may transfer the costs of infection to their offspring. Although t...
متن کاملTransgenerational transmission of trauma and resilience: a qualitative study with Brazilian offspring of Holocaust survivors
BACKGROUND Over the past five decades, clinicians and researchers have debated the impact of the Holocaust on the children of its survivors. The transgenerational transmission of trauma has been explored in more than 500 articles, which have failed to reach reliable conclusions that could be generalized. The psychiatric literature shows mixed findings regarding this subject: many clinical studi...
متن کامل