alt Hacker NewsSomeone who works out every day will obviously have different metabolic and microRNA profiles; assuming that line of research holds up and those biomolecular profiles make it into the zygote, survive many replication cycles, and act as developmental signalling molecules affecting gene expression during embryonic and fetal development, there could be life-long effects.
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't paired with specific, unique metabolic, hormonal, and gene-expression signatures. Only biomolecular-mediated phenotypes, the most general and obvious of which would be things like stress or exercise or diet, make sense to be transmitted that way.
For instance, someone who's chronically afraid might transmit some kind of stress/fear modulating signals to offspring. Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed. Therefore, I don't know why the article uses the term "lived experience", which is too broad a term to describe what the research suggests might be occurring.
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Not much of a stretch to consider that the brain is wired to initiate biochemistry that modifies the germ line.
We know that severe stress (such as trauma) leaves chemical marks on the genes, potentially passed down to the offspring. For example, this paper writes about an “accumulating amount of evidence of an enduring effect of trauma exposure to be passed to offspring transgenerationally: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5977074/
Though “lived experience” can encompass a lot of things, it definitely encompasses severe stress.
For example, constantly worrying about money because you’re poor can definitely put you under severe stress. Also, growing up without secure attachment to your caretakers, being asked to do role reversal (having to take care of your parents as a child), things like that will generate complex PTSD.
> Someone who's afraid of a specific thing, however, cannot transmit fear of that specific thing unless there's some incredible and unexplored cognition-to-biomolecular signalling mechanism that's entirely unexplored and undescribed.
While there is absolutely no conclusive evidence, there are a few studies that indicate this is a possibility.
One such study from 2013: https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.3594
Again, there’s not strong proof- but at least plausible evidence.