Study of Holocaust survivors finds trauma passed on to children's genes

>Not to mention that their sample size was 32.

No offense (really!), but this kind of criticism makes me suspect that you don't know much about research and statistics.

Statistical power matters, not the sample size, per se. If you want to criticize the size of n, you have to tell us what makes you think they have insufficient statistical power (which will invariably involve estimating an effect size for us).

Your previous points are well-taken, though.

There are definitely known links between psychology and genes; we know the epigenetics behind why if mothers are stressed when pregnant, their children will be more stressed for their entire lives. Far too many people still have the Jurassic Park view of DNA and believe in Central Dogma—but it has become clear that environment and all sorts of post-conception events effect genetics. Dr. Sapolsky, in this lecture series, explains, for just one example, how and why Lamarckian evolution sometimes occurs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C...

Compiler, rather.

More like next time be sure to compile without -DTRAUMA.

I knew that block inside #ifdef TRAUMA ... #endif was suspicious.

You would be quite a few generations away from the originating event. Here, they're studying the very next generation.

Obviously the effect wears out over time or we would all have these markers ... somewhere at some point, all of our ancestors had a rough time.

I would recommend reading Code to Joy, by George Pratt and Peter Lambrou. It is an excellent book, that lets you understand how the mind works (basically, the relationship between conscious and unconscious mind), and how traumas affect our daily life. It also describes how to clear them out, and it has worked for me.

The book has references on how that theory began with Roger Callahan at the end of the 1980's. Tapping the healer within is one of these books, which I would recommend if you're interested in the subject, but not as a guide to clear away your fears of your unconscious mind.

The basis for the approach I've pursued came from a book called The Biology of Belief [1], by former Stanford stem-cell researcher Bruce Lipton. The book is about epigenetics, and the way environmental factors - particularly the influence of subconscious beliefs on the perception of your environment, can influence physiological health. I found it compelling and I seem to have benefited by pursuing the ideas, but it's not for everyone; despite his scientific background his primary audience these days is the New Age market, and I know his way of articulating his ideas is too woo-woo for many. But he is entertaining.

The method I've used for trauma clearing is called NET [2] which came out of the chiropractic world, but I've since learned how to do it myself so I no longer need to spend money on chiropractors, most of whom I now regard as quacks.

The closest version of the technique I now use is a method called Self Clearing, demonstrated in this video [3] by an Australian guy called Dane Thomas.

I'm well aware that all this stuff will seem like quackery to many; as a former devotee of Dawkins and Hitchens, it sure did to me, but my ongoing health struggles necessitated a willingness to try anything, and of the many things I tried, this has been the one that's delivered results.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Biology-Belief-Unleashing-Consciou...

[2] https://www.netmindbody.com/more-information/an-introduction...

[3] http://clearyourshit.com/self-clearing-foundations-1/

Of course war's been part of the human condition since inception, but it hasn't been evenly distributed, has it?

I think about this every time I'm at a zoo or monkey temple watching primates interact - fighting, sure, but not torturing or persecuting or enslaving or committing genocide - and wonder at what point in evolution did we start being so brutal and cruel to one another as to cause the kind of trauma that now seems so common.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert on history, so I don't know how far back we've had the scale and brutality of the wars of the last 100-or-so years. But I have an easy time believing that the more recent wars have done more to traumatise people who were in them, as well as those who weren't due to the widespread media coverage that's also happened relatively recently.

At the same time, I agree with your point; trauma is not new and we certainly see it in other animals (maltreated dogs for example).

And I certainly believe the phenomenon I'm talking about could go back well beyond the past 100-ish years; that would make sense in my case, as none of my parents or grandparents were directly involved in the wars.

But I just wonder if the scale and brutality of the more recent wars, along with the media exposure, have made the problem more intense and widespread.

While violence has always been a part of the human condition, the scale of destruction wrought by modern war is novel. Violence in pre-Neolithic (pre-agricultural times, which characterizes the vast majority of our time as a species on this earth) was much more interpersonal. Think, two guys fighting over one girl, kind of personal. Organized group on group violence was a rarity. It's only with the creation of complex societies that we see the kinds of wars where whole ethnicities are targeted and uprooted. It's entirely possible that people experience more 'trauma' due to the differing nature of violence these days.

Here's a link to a good article by an anthropologist explaining it better than I do: http://aeon.co/magazine/society/human-beings-do-not-have-an-...

If your genetic heritage has never been the target of genocide, it is easy to maintain an emotional detachment.

A more charitable reading would be that the poster is affected by the realization that people of their genetic heritage were recently treated that way, not that they are claiming it is especially bad somehow because of the people it happened to.

Because it's the topic at hand?

Some people don't have English as a first language. You should probably try harder to give their comments a charitable interpretation.

Elitist? For something done by the nazis? Aren't you sure your critic is a little misplaced ?

> It has long been discussed within the Jewish community that lots of children of survivors can be really screwed up - not just their parents.

Does the Jewish community have any awareness of whether children of survivors who are raised by someone other than the survivors tend to be? In other words, can we (even anecdotally) begin to tease apart inheritance versus environment?

I understand that entirely, but in order to prove biological causation you would have to study much larger groups, and setup your control groups in such a way as to control for the attitudes of affected parents passing there genetic expression to their children through environmental, rather than biological methods. To create an accurate scientifically meaningful study you would want to study 4 groups:

1. Children of affected parents raised by their parents. 2. Children of affected parents raised by someone else, an unaffected relative, for instance. 3. Children of unaffected parents raised by their parents. 4. Children of unaffected parents raised by affected parents.

If you see elevated reaction to stress in groups 1 and 2, but not 3 and 4, then there is a clear biological causation here. However, if you observe elevated reaction to stress in groups 1 and 4, but not 2 and 3, then there could be something environmental going on. Basically, in order to properly help people, we need to first properly identify the problem. For instance, if the problem is biological, then a biological solution in a form of a drug might be effective. However, if the problem is environmental, then psychological help for the prospective parents might be highly effective.

I understand that victims of the Holocaust are very old by now and it's very hard to come up with proper sample groups. However, unfortunately, there are many other horrible instances of inhumane things going on in the world, and many instances of people surviving through those situations. The Rwandan holocaust victims and the survivors of the ethnic cleansing in the balkan states are just two examples, and there are many others, as you have pointed out.

Anything that changes behavior can eventually lead to speciation.