Tough luck, this might affect his grandkid, not the kid. Epigenetic imprinting (the semi-permanent kind) is done during oogenesis, which if I am right occurs during pregnancy.
It’s also not necessarily a net-gain. There are a bunch of trade-offs to being better able to deal with a lack of food. Specifically, by sacrificing body mass and brain development to conserve energy.
Surviving adverse conditions can mean developing novel evolutionary strategies. But it can also just amount to evolutionary downsizing. Living as a smaller, weaker, stunted version of your predecessors because the runt of the litter needs fewer calories to get by.
Yeah I was about to say. Aren’t children from families that suffered famines much more likely to have (and have children that have) digestive problems and food related deficensies?
And heart and respiratory and neurological, etc etc
What’s the plan with the raptor? Increase the kid’s running speed? Anxiety? Fear of birds? Love for Spielberg movies?
The ability to perfectly deliver the line, “clever girl.”
Epigenetics is black magic to me. The starvation thing is true, but it mostly happens in the liver and pancreas and stuff. The testicles and ovaries don’t express the genes relating to starvation, even when starved. So how does the reproductive DNA pass on epigenetic data to the child and grandchild?
Although the immediate processing of food might occur in major digestive organs, the effect of increased or decreased nutrient availability will be felt throughout the body. One primary effect of starvation is the breaking down of cells (autophagy) in order to reuse their components for more necessary bodily functions - like the atrophying of muscles.
Naturally, your germ line cells are one of your core bodily functions, so the nutrients will necessarily need to make their way there.
One recent paper[1] hypothesized that the byproducts of this cellular breakdown can cause cells to bundle up DNA that encodes some genes, rendering them less accessible and therefore less active. This can even be passed trans-generationally (presumably by altering the tight storage of specific genes in the germ line cells).
Broadly this mechanism is called epigenetics, where specific histone protein modifications cause regions of DNA to coil up tightly, making it far less likely to be expressed, or unwind and become far more active. It’s a very neat mechanism by which many characteristics can become generational despite not having a clear genetic component.
“Epigenetics shows…” cries in evolutionary biology having demonstrated inter-generational plasticity for more than 30 years, totally ignored by molecular geneticists who discovered after everybody else that everything is not about DNA
“is is”
If they starve as young
Plan for the future
In 2011 I heard about/read a study/article that detailed the listed example.
Tldr dieting while pregnant will make your baby more likely to be overweight. Don’t do that.
Cuck vore
Nothing wrong with that
Epigenetics is part of how DNA works though, it isn’t separate
