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Comment by duskwuff | Hacker News Reader

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Sure it can. Type 2 diabetes is both hereditary and lifestyle/behavioral influenced . Same with cancer, if you have cancer in your family your risk of getting cancer is higher. I would say most medical issues are both. Heart disease, gout, obesity, hypertension,strokes,asthma etc.

Let me put this a bit differently: Type 2 diabetes is both genetic and can be acquired during one's life (e.g. through bad dietary choices). But a man who develops diabetes does not acquire genetic T2D by doing so - he cannot pass it on directly to his children.

> But a man who develops diabetes does not acquire genetic T2D by doing so - he cannot pass it on directly to his children.

Epigenetic changes absolutely can be passed to children even over multiple generations--this is already proven.

Which epigenetic changes are caused by T2D and whether they predispose the next generation to T2D would be the question.

You could get a Nobel prize or two by proving this statement.

How we pass on acquired traits to offspring is not well understood at all. We know there’s a mechanism, but not how it works or how selective it is.

So having rehabilitated the Luddites, HN is now moving on to Lysenko. Peachy.

You not knowing something doesn’t make it not exist.

https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/study-shows-how-effects-...

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4377509/

https://www.brown.edu/news/2016-12-12/famine

Confusing the effects of starvation with Lamarckian inheritance is a fundamental category error. If starvation affected every cell in your body except for the gametes, that would be worth investigating.

> with Lamarckian inheritance is a fundamental category error

Would you believe that things are more complex than neat categories discovered in 1850 that you learn in fifth grade?

Starvation is just the most studied aspect of this as it is easier to find control groups. However, you could easily search and find others, which you don't seem to be willing to do for some reason.

This is not groundbreaking research, this has been known for a while. The current focus is to understand possible non-genetic pathways for this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics

The average health literacy of the HN crowd leaves me to believe that the median HN user is grossly overweight, among other things…

Check out epigenetics.

"Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene expression that occur without altering the underlying DNA sequence. These changes, also known as epigenetic modifications, affect how genes are turned "on" or "off" and are influenced by factors like environment, lifestyle, and aging."

Himalayan rabbits having black fur where their skin is cold and white fur where it's warm is a useful and obvious example of this.

That's a separate effect, known as acromelanism, or "point coloration". It's the result of an enzyme which is inactivated by higher temperatures, not a genetic change - the extent of pointing can change over an animal's lifetime, and the specific pattern isn't inherited. (For instance, if you somehow convinced a cat with color pointing to wear a sweater, its fur would stay light under that sweater, but any offspring it had would not inherit that pattern.)

A better example might be how some animals (turtles in particular) have their sex defined by their egg temperature

That isn't a genetic change either, though. Those species of turtle either lack the typical sex-determining chromosomes entirely, or have sex-determining chromosomes which can be inactivated during development. The genotype doesn't change as a result of what temperature the egg is incubated at; its expression does.

Further reading: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210726102148.h...

That's exactly the point. Gene expression can be modified by the environment

Are the imprinted patterns then inherited, though?

No. Sounds like I was wrong earlier.

It's literally almost always both.

You can have a genetic tendency to a certain outcome which is exacerbated by environmental factors. This is very common.

That's exactly what autism is established to be... it has some genetic factors but it develops in the womb.

Reread the parent comment.

And so what doesn't make sense to you about those two sentences?

Polydactyly is both hereditary and acquired during development.

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