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6/23/2025, 8:12:05 PM
>>24490272
>What about the wikipedia article itself? You read it? What's your verdict
The article is fine, though it's lacking citations in a few places and the header should be enough proof you should take it with a grain of salt. The gist of the claim I think you're drawing from says 'Environmental factors can induce the epigenetic marks (epigenetic tags) for some epigenetically influenced traits. These can include, but are not limited to, changes in temperature, resources availability, exposure to pollutants, chemicals, and endocrine disruptors.' That's true; I agree with that, it's widely accepted. I caution extrapolating 'are not limited to' to complex traits like memory for a few reasons I'll try to illustrate now.
It isn't easy for epigenetic markers to encode complex traits. The vast majority of epigenetic markers are histone modifications (histones are large proteins which DNA is packed/wound around when it's not being actively transcribed) which do one of four things: upregulate transcription, downregulate transcription, mark a gene as a site of active transcription, or silence a gene. Neurobiology isn't my specialty, but I know enough to know that things like skill and physical memory are dynamically encoded by shifting enhancer and promoter activity in relevant genes which results in a physical rearrangement of neurons into a structure which allows the reproduction of action from memory, activity which is localized and doesn't involve all neurons of the same type.
>What about the wikipedia article itself? You read it? What's your verdict
The article is fine, though it's lacking citations in a few places and the header should be enough proof you should take it with a grain of salt. The gist of the claim I think you're drawing from says 'Environmental factors can induce the epigenetic marks (epigenetic tags) for some epigenetically influenced traits. These can include, but are not limited to, changes in temperature, resources availability, exposure to pollutants, chemicals, and endocrine disruptors.' That's true; I agree with that, it's widely accepted. I caution extrapolating 'are not limited to' to complex traits like memory for a few reasons I'll try to illustrate now.
It isn't easy for epigenetic markers to encode complex traits. The vast majority of epigenetic markers are histone modifications (histones are large proteins which DNA is packed/wound around when it's not being actively transcribed) which do one of four things: upregulate transcription, downregulate transcription, mark a gene as a site of active transcription, or silence a gene. Neurobiology isn't my specialty, but I know enough to know that things like skill and physical memory are dynamically encoded by shifting enhancer and promoter activity in relevant genes which results in a physical rearrangement of neurons into a structure which allows the reproduction of action from memory, activity which is localized and doesn't involve all neurons of the same type.
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