How stress echoes down the generations | Hacker News Reader

How stress echoes down the generations

economist.com

129 pointssethbannon46 comments

As a grandchild of holocaust survivors this rings very true. I’ve always felt I had stress triggers that “didn’t belong to me” so to speak.

I also believe this is what African Americans are still experiencing, while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly just two or three generations ago that there was segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings etc.

Jim Crow, segregation and lynchings were zero generations ago for a lot of people. It's easy to forget because so many of the leaders of the civil rights movement died early of unnatural causes, but someone who was 18 when the Civil Rights Act was passed is now only 72.

>while maybe slavery was long ago to have been "worked out" of the genes, it was roughly just two or three generations ago that there was segregation, Jim Crow laws, lynchings etc.

Slavery in the US was only two human lifetimes ago. My grandfather has living memory of older relatives who were born slaves. And then white people who's grandparents were homesteaders, farmers, or small business owners wonder why black people today have no wealth.

In the 1920s or so, black men were 24% self employed or had their own small business. Now it is a lot less than that. What exactly happened is up for debate but the results are certainly sad.

Can you show where that stat came from? 24% seems so high that it must be reflecting some major obvious phenomenon. Was there a big class of jobs that doesn't exist anymore? Were a quarter of white men self employed too? Was discrimination was so great that self-employment was a far better way to get work? Is that 24% of black men or working black men, or working-age black men? The statistic on its own leave so much confusion. Maybe self-employed meant itinerant farm laborer? It might not be so sad for that to stop existing.

I would believe it and I also believe the decline was due to racism. Southern racists didn’t like seeing prosperous black people. Just look at what happened to Rosewood:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosewood_massacre

Was the small business rate more common for all ethnicities back then? Without context this stat doesn't really tell us much.

Mass employment as employees is a relatively new phenomenom.

The other 76% were unemployed or in a precarious job.

Desegregation and no more lynchings (which was prevalent enough it was basically domestic terrorism) is sad?

It's a lot of fun to form beliefs in the absence of data.

It's a lot of fun to assume. /s

How do you know I haven't formed this view based on data? You're assuming I don't have any data.

Because if you had data you'd be like, "here's the data."

If your guess is right, we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in. Well, do we? I don't know.

> we'd see differences in the effects of Jim Crow depending on what part of the country people lived in

That's one, very obtuse hypothesis.

Interesting you replied to this and not the parent?

Seems appropriate because it applies up the whole comment chain.

And if you're going to try and draw conclusions, then come out and say it instead of noncommittally leaving it up to our imagination.

The past 50 years have not been so great for African American families either.

When you choose your opinions so that they conform to popular politics, you're at risk of getting contorted into contradictions just to keep having the "right" beliefs. This research says stress causes genetic differences in subsequent generations. So if it's the cause of modern black poverty and violence, it would mean black people are genetically susceptible to being poor and violent. If you consider poverty and violence as inferior qualities, then it says black people are genetically inferior to white people, which is so incompatible with popular culture that you'll be be ostracized for even mentioning the idea!

I think you're reaching too far there

Sorry for assuming your motivation. Do you agree with my conclusion about blacks being genetically inferior? Is there a mistake in my logic? Perhaps being RNA, not DNA makes it not quite the same thing?

If the main objective of DNA and genes is to spread itself, black people still have some obvious genetics advantage, historically. And it doesn't seem to be changing, much the opposite.

The German men and women who are descendants of the raped and tortured German women, victims of the Red Army, which Solzhenitsyn wrote about, as well...

I don't write this to be insulting, but to point out that untold millions of people were affected.

As a german with a severly war-traumatized grandmother (who was a teenager back then and while we don't know in the family, it might have been rape) I first of all would like to note, that you should not point out the Red Army alone. The events were more complex than that.

Then I would like to ask every one reading this, to support mental health care for their neighbours, but also for refugees and inhabitants of war-stricken countries.

If you live in a democratic country, use your active right to vote to elect candidates promoting free mental health care. If these candidates don't exist, get involved in one of the political parties to push the issue into focus.

I couldn't agree more. There huge benefits to society as a whole in making sure everyone has opportunities to receive support in this area-- I wouldn't be surprised if they vastly outweigh whatever it costs to provide them. Everything from homelessness to school shootings could be reduced.

There's already a stigma associated with seeking mental health services, and the costs on top of that make it a non-starter for many of the people who need it most.

And advocate not to cause massive health problems on children today: http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/trump-administration-separ...

Polish displaced people. Russians citizens who seen villages burned in cold winter as German army was doing their "cleaning up for settlements you are not even people" thing. By historical accounts, German army behavior in West was very bad and much worst on Easter front.

If you are going to single out Red Army, lets also not forget the other armies in that war.

(And yes, people affected by communist persecutions have their trauma too.)

Going back a few generations I am sure the majority of people had some stressful situations in there lives.

Wouldn't this be true for anyone who survived WWII? In other words, a majority of the people on the planet, centering around Europe and the Far East? But every single Soviet citizen was negatively affected by a war that cost them 27M lives.

I don't think that would be true, people were affected by WWII to different extents.

On a personal level, I can't really claim any negative effects, both grandfathers were in reserved occupations in the UK.

Most likely

A total of mere 28 samples unlikely to make a convencing result.

This is a common pattern in all the epigenetic research I've seen thus far.

Makes me wonder how one accounts for people unavailable to interview because they've already died of stress-related causes.

Any reason why this case would diverge from the rule of ~30 being statistically relevant?

Sounds like they haven't yet shown (1) that the sperm characteristic is heritable in humans, nor (2) that it has any effect on human phenotype.

I think this is exactly backwards.

My kids stress me out more than anything else. ;)

I don’t have any problem with this kind of joke. Parenting can be incredibly stressful, and its difficulty varies widely.

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