https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/banned-pregnancy-med-still-affecting-daughters-grand...

"The grandchildren of women who used a drug called diethylstilbestrol, or DES, during pregnancy have a higher risk of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), new research shows.

"Endocrine-disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the body’s intricate hormone system, and have been associated with a number of neurological disorders, including ADHD. Increasing evidence suggests they can alter the epigenetic programming of reproductive cells. In other words, they can cause heritable changes in gene activity.

"Animal studies show that endocrine disruptors, such as di(2ethylhexyl)phthalate (DEHP) and bisphenol A (BPA), are indeed linked with negative neurological effects in subsequent generations, but it was unknown if this was also the case for humans.

***

"DES was prescribed to millions of women between 1938 and 1971, because it was thought to prevent miscarriage. However, a 1953 study showed it to be ineffective. Another study in 1971 revealed increased rates of vaginal cancer in the daughters of women who had taken it, and it was banned that same year.

"DES, it turned out, was a potent endocrine disruptor.

"The new research examined the self-reported health information of 47,540 participants enrolled in the ongoing study. Of these, nearly 2% had mothers who had used DES during pregnancy. Moreover, many of the nurses in the cohort had gone on to have children of their own.

“'Our aim was to explore the potential impact of DES use across generations, and specifically on third-generation neurodevelopment,” says the study’s first-author, Marianthi-Anna Kioumourtzoglou of the Columbia University Mailman Institute of Public Health.

***

"The findings revealed that grandchildren of the women who had used DES were 36% more likely to have ADHD than grandchildren of women who had not used the drug, regardless of whether those grandchildren were male or female.

"The findings provide evidence in humans that exposure to endocrine disruptors during pregnancy can alter neurodevelopment in later generations.

“'While DES is banned, pregnant women continue to be exposed to a large number of environmental endocrine disruptors,” says co-author Marc Weisskopf of Harvard.
“And although current exposures are at a lower level and potency than seen with DES, cumulative exposures to these chemicals may be cause for concern and is deserving of further study.'”

Comment: Autism was unknown when I was in Med school. Alzheimer very rare. we live in a chemical world and don't fully understand it. We are too smart for our own good.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180216110547.htm

"New research in mice has found that a father's stress affects the brain development of his offspring. This stress changes the father's sperm, which can then alter the brain development of the child. This new research provides a much better understanding of the key role that fathers play in the brain development of offspring.

"Scientists have known that a mother's environment during pregnancy, including factors such as poor diet, stress or infection, can cause damage negatively impact her offspring. This may be due in part to how this environment affects the expression of certain genes -- known as epigenetics.

***

"Previously, Bale had found that adult male mice experiencing chronic periods of mild stress have offspring with a reduced response to stress; changes in stress reactivity have been linked to some neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression and PTSD. She and her colleagues isolated the mechanism of the reduced response; they found that the father's sperm showed changes in genetic material known as microRNA. MicroRNA are important because they play a key role in which genes become functional proteins.

"Now, Bale and her colleagues have unraveled new details about these microRNA changes. In the male reproductive tract, the caput epididymis, the structure where sperm matures, releases tiny vesicles packed with microRNA that can fuse with sperm to change its cargo delivered to the egg. The caput epididymis responded to the father's stress by altering the content of these vesicles.

"This suggests that even mild environmental challenges can have a significant impact on the development and potentially the health of future offspring."

Comment: Lamarck is alive and well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/science/dutch-famine-genes.html

"By the time the Netherlands was liberated in May 1945, more than 20,000 people had died of starvation.

"The Dutch Hunger Winter has proved unique in unexpected ways. Because it started and ended so abruptly, it has served as an unplanned experiment in human health. Pregnant women, it turns out, were uniquely vulnerable, and the children they gave birth to have been influenced by famine throughout their lives.

"When they became adults, they ended up a few pounds heavier than average. In middle age, they had higher levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol. They also experienced higher rates of such conditions as obesity, diabetes and schizophrenia.

"By the time they reached old age, those risks had taken a measurable toll, according to the research of L.H. Lumey, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. In 2013, he and his colleagues reviewed death records of hundreds of thousands of Dutch people born in the mid-1940s.

"They found that the people who had been in utero during the famine — known as the Dutch Winter Hunger cohort — died at a higher rate than people born before or afterward. “We found a 10 percent increase in mortality after 68 years,” said Dr. Lumey.

“'How on earth can your body remember the environment it was exposed to in the womb — and remember that decades later?” wondered Bas Heijmans, a geneticist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

"Dr. Heijmans, Dr. Lumey and their colleagues published a possible answer, or part of one, on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. Their study suggests that the Dutch Hunger Winter silenced certain genes in unborn children — and that they’ve stayed quiet ever since.

"While all cells in a person’s body share the same genes, different ones are active or silent in different cells. That program largely is locked in place before birth.

***

"the researchers merged the results — and found a few methyl groups that were linked both to the famine and to health conditions later in life. “We were able to connect the three dots,” said Dr. Lumey.

"Dr. Lumey and his colleagues propose that these methyl groups disrupt how cells normally use genes. One methyl group that is linked to a higher body mass index may be able to quiet a gene called PIM3, which is involved in burning the body’s fuel.

"So here’s the theory: Perhaps the Dutch Hunger Winter added a methyl group to fetuses born to starving mothers, which made the PIM3 gene less active — and continued to do so for life.
The result? “Maybe your metabolism is in a lower gear,” Dr. Heijmans said.

***

"John M. Greally, the director of the Center for Epigenomics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, noted that blood is made up of many different types of cells, each with its own epigenetic profile.

"Maybe the Dutch famine made some types of cells more common, he said, rather than altering the epigenetics.

"But Dr. Heijmans and his colleagues studied the same methyl groups in muscle cells, fat cells and other tissues they got from cadavers. In any given person, the pattern was roughly the same."

Comment: Lamarckism is alive and well through methylation of genes.

https://cosmosmagazine.com/biology/worms-inherit-epigenetic-traits

"Geneticists love the tiny worm Caenorhabditis elegans for its simplicity and the way it replicates the functions of more complex and intractable creatures. It has played a key role in much fundamental biological research in the last 50 years.

"It was the first multicellular organism to have its whole genome sequenced, the first to have the full wiring of its nervous system (or connectome) mapped, and the full developmental path of every cell in its body is known.

"Now researchers at the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona, Spain, and colleagues have used C. elegans to show that impairments to the DNA replication process can cause epigenetic changes – alterations in the way that certain genes are expressed in the body – that can be passed on to as many as five generations of descendants.

"Even when the descendants did not themselves carry the mutation that caused faulty DNA replication, they nonetheless carried the changes in gene expression.

"The research is an important new clue in the study of how epigenetic changes are inherited, an area which is still poorly understood."

Comment: Adaptations certainly occur through changes in gene expression, but we still have no evidence of the process of speciation, the real key to evolution. Most species appear to be the result of saltation.

https://phys.org/news/2017-07-competitive-world-guppies-born-bigger.html

"Essentially one of two fates confront the guppies who inhabit the South American island's mountain streams. Guppies who live lower down the mountain face a constant threat of predators. Fish higher up the slope live a relatively predator-free life, but it's no paradise because in waters teeming with fellow guppies, the competition for limited food is stiff. Up to now, what scientists had observed is that guppy moms in the high-predation (HP) waters produced scads of smaller young while guppies in the low-predation areas (LP) produced fewer but larger young.

"In the new study in Scientific Reports, Brown postdoctoral researcher Terry Dial and colleagues report that the size difference of a couple of millimeters of length may not be the most meaningful one. Instead, the larger guppies in the LP streams are born significantly more mature, at least where it counts for their way of eating. It's their internal anatomy that may promote their survival.

"LP guppy mouth joints swing twice as widely (22 degrees instead of 11), the researchers found. As a result their jaws open to a bigger gape. The heads of LP guppies are 90 percent hardened at birth, while HP guppies are only 20 percent hardened. Finally, the muscles controlling the jaws are bigger in LP guppies. Eventually, HP guppies will catch up - if they survive - but LP guppies are born better at scraping algae and diatoms off stream rocks for dinner.

"'There is more to it than just an investment in sheer size," Dial said. "This is the first time we'd really gone into the morphology and anatomy of these animals and tried to tease apart what is different about these fish other than just size."

"Dial found that not only were the HP and LP populations significantly different in this regard, but also the larger newborns within LP populations were significantly more mature than the smaller newborns in LP populations.

"Of course the guppies aren't consciously strategizing. Instead, Dial said, evolution in LP environments apparently selects for moms that produce more fully mature newborns, because those babies are better at competing for food and are therefore more likely to survive and carry on mom's lineage. On the other hand, in HP streams where the main danger is predators, evolution may favor moms who produce so many young, because surely some number will survive to grow up and reproduce without being eaten."

Comment: These guppies are amazingly adaptable, but they do not create a new species.


> So what part is not autonomous (other than the obvious fact that organisms cannot do what organisms cannot do)? This is why I have challenged you on your insistence that your God must have given personal demonstrations.... I notice you have skipped that passage.-Just covered the issue of instinct in the balance of nature thread.
> 
> DAVID: Humans and other animals reason. I've never denied that. However you continue to fail to see the enormous difference in capacity humans have, and the fact that there was no necessity in evolution to automatically invent humans. 
> 
> dhw: I am fully aware of the enormous difference,... (There was no necessity for evolution to have come up with the duck-billed platypus, so what does that prove?)-They are part of the higgledy-piggledy bush. We are above it.

dhw: If only you could rid yourself of the prejudice that humans alone are possessed of any autonomous inventive intelligence (a prejudice that persists despite the many articles you have posted, demonstrating the reasoning powers of other species) you would see that there is no need for a 3.7-billion-year computer programme to cover every single innovation and lifestyle, or for your God to give personal demonstrations to all his creatures to show them how to build nests and webs and honeycombs and dams, and live wacky lifestyles.-We are covering old territory. I agree with Kauffman that life may contain a self-organizing mechanism. We see it in epigenetic changes that are heritable. I just don't see it as fully autonomous. Humans and other animals reason. I've never denied that. However you continue to fail to see the enormous difference in capacity humans have, and the fact that there was no necessity in evolution to automatically invent humans. Just as Hoyle commented about the resonances of carbon, 'it looks as if someone monkeyed with the works' (paraphrased), the appearance of humans gives the same impression to me.

dhw: My alternative is that the birds themselves cooperated in pooling their (God-given?) intelligence to develop the design. No need for God to get involved at all.-First you proposed committee meetings of single cells, now birds. Don't you think God chaired the meetings?


> DAVID: I have never denied that organisms have self-evolutionary abilities. I've discussed epigenetics endlessly here. It is the issue of how independent those abilities are that we are in disagreement about. 
> 
> Your argument has always been that cells / cell communities are automatons obeying instructions. You have, however, recently tried to introduce a concept of semi-autonomy. We have agreed that no organism can “self-evolve” beyond the limits imposed by its own nature and by the environment, but for you even the weaverbird cannot be granted a sufficient degree of autonomy to design its own nest.-Simply, the nest is too complex for the weaverbirds to have designed it. But they could have been helped in the design development, a cooperative effort, much like a parent teaching a child how to dress. View it like coaching cricket. Coach demonstrates, player learns and improves.-> 
> DAVID: I still think your Darwin roots from earlier in your life play a role. But I admit you seem to have accepted much of my anti-Darwin-theory proposals.
> 
> dhw:Yes, they play a significant role, because I believe that all living organisms except the first descended from earlier organisms. .... When I opened this website seven years ago, I expressed the hope that by combining our discoveries, we might help one another to gain new insights. You have done this on a scale far beyond what I could have hoped for, and thanks to you, George, BBella, Tony, Matt and many others who have come and gone, even though I'm still on the fence, I have a much broader view!-Thank you for all of us. I pity your rump.


> dhw: The authors link this development with an increase in oxygen (a factor which some researchers also link to the Cambrian Explosion). No doubt you will see this as another piece of your God's preprogramming, passed on by the first cells, but I can't help feeling it fits in perfectly with the concept of cells themselves experimenting as the environment offers new opportunities.-I have never denied that organisms have self-evolutionary abilities. I've discussed epigenetics endlessly here. It is the issue of how independent those abilities are that we are in disagreement about. I still think your Darwin roots from earlier in your life play a role. But I admit you seem to have accepted much of my anti-Darwin-theory proposals.