Experiences Can Be Genetically Inherited?

Discussion in 'Human Science' started by Xenu, Jun 4, 2003.

  1. Xenu BBS Whore Registered Senior Member

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    One of my old professors told me of the following experiment. I'm trying to find out who did this experiment and look it up. Has anyone heard about this experiment before?

    A female rat was given poisoned cranberry juice. The poison made her extremely sick but did not kill her. Naturally, because of taste aversions, she would never drink cranberry juice again. She was then impregnated and had several children. After birth all of her children were immediately taken away and raised separately. Of her children, about half would not drink cranberry juice (as compared to naturally, almost all rats drink it). Then when those children had children, about a quarter of their children wouldn't drink cranberry juice.

    This study suggests that experiences can be inherited genetically. Now is anyone familiar with this study? If so, could you direct me where to either find this study or a book that talks about this study?

    Thanks.
     
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  3. BillClintonsCigar Registered Senior Member

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    Wow! The significance of this is huge if it's true!

    What gets me with most studies is that they aren't really scientific: many similar tests (such as those used to test cannabis) produce different, conflicting results; that implies experimenter bias. This study however sounds ok to me Xenu. i will keep my ears open for you!

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  5. whitewolf asleep under the juniper bush Registered Senior Member

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    Read Jung's Man and His Symbols. Im not sure of how much of it has to do with DNA though...
    But if you think ab it, the eggs of the rat were formed way before she drank the juice, so the genetic makeup of the children, the half inherited from mother, was already set up long before the experiment.
     
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  7. sargentlard Save the whales motherfucker Valued Senior Member

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    Has the results of this experiment been reproduced many times with consistent or somewhat consistent results. If their is empirical evidence for this than this could be a great finding???....i have never heard of this study but i'll try to look it up for you

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  8. ProCop Valued Senior Member

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    RE:

    Jung believed in a collective knowlede base of all experience of a species. It was tested in england and australia if the rats in england mastered a labyrint (to get to their food) the rats in australia mastered the same labyrint in much shorter time. The way how it happens is unknown but the knowledge between the members of a species is shared.
     
  9. weebee Registered Senior Member

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    Oh stop being so silly, shared species memories, genetic experience….

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    Sounds far too much like star wars to me…

    I can’t find this experiment anywhere so I’d suggest that your prof was having a joke at your expense because if this experiment had been done, it would have gained notoriety.

    but good luck with finding the reference
     
  10. Xerxes asdfghjkl Valued Senior Member

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    My understanding of DNA's structure would lead me to believe that this phenomenon is not hereditary(I hope that's not what you think), but more likely an environmental (the womb) inheritence. Anything the mother has in her system will be shared over with the offspring. A mother that grows an immunity or tolerance to the poison may also grow one to the associated juice. Just like alcohol or anything else. No surprises there.

    The babies - if concieved soon enough afterwards - would probably develop a resistance of their own, and the taste of the cranberry juice could probably trigger some kind of a response to it. I don't really understand all of the mumbo jumbo behind it, but do have a vague clue. For example -- the kids of some drug addicts tend to be addicts themselves (not behaviourally) but naturally addicted crack head babies. Very sad.

    So to answer your question I've never heard of the experiment. And I doubt it has any realy scientific importance anyways..
     
    Last edited: Jun 8, 2003
  11. whitewolf asleep under the juniper bush Registered Senior Member

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    I can understand how the offspring's immune system would protect them from the poison; I can understand why their bodies would reject the juice. My question is how did they develop a preference that corresponds to mother's experience?
     
  12. SkinWalker Archaeology / Anthropology Moderator

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    It sounds like what you are describing is a meme, the cultural equivalent of a gene as postulated by Dawkins in 1976...

    As for the experiment, however, if, as you say, it involved "a" female rat, wouldn't this be too small a sample? Wouldn't a control group be used as well?

    This could very well be the case, but, without a citation to check the study it would be hard to verify.

    I've not read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, but I gather that it involves the idea that culture can be passed down in a near genetic format. I place more credence on the idea that cultural norms are learned through conscious and unconscious observation. The rat, however, could not have passed on its distaste for cranberry juice unless there was a chemical response that lingered through its fecund cycle.
     
  13. ProCop Valued Senior Member

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    RE:weebee


    not really what I meant but close: see <a href=http://twm.co.nz/shel_morfields.htm>here</a>

    excerpt:

    <i>In the meantime, the puzzles about memory have grown even stranger. This part of our story will take us to one of the most controversial frontiers of current science, although it actually starts back in 1920 when W. McDougall, a biologist at Harvard, began an experiment to see if animals (in this case white rats) could inherit learning. The procedure was to teach the rats a simple task (avoiding a lighted exit), record how fast they learned, breed another generation, teach them the same task, and see how their rate of learning compared with their elders. He carried the experiment through 34 generations and found that, indeed, each generation learned faster in flat contradiction to the usual Darwinian assumptions about heredity. Such a result naturally raised controversy, and similar experiments were run to prove or disprove the result. The last of these was done by W.E. Agar at Melbourne over a period of 20 years ending in 1954. Using the same general breed of rats, he found the same pattern of results that McDougall had but in addition he found that untrained rats used as a control group also learned faster in each new generation. (Curiously, he also found that his first generation of rats started at the same rate of learning as McDougall's last generation.) No one had a good explanation for why both trained and untrained should be learning faster, but since this result did not support the idea that learning was inherited, the biology community breathed a sigh of relief and considered the matter closed.


    But the big implication of this approach is that memory is transpersonal. These mental morphogenetic fields are not locked in your brain, but are available throughout all space and all future time! From this perspective, the results of the McDougall- Agar experiments become easily understood. Each rat that learned the task gradually strengthened a morphogenetic field associated with the correct choice. Later rats of the same breed placed in the identical experimental setting could have a high degree of resonance with the earlier rats regardless of whether their immediate parents had been trained. Agar's rats started where McDougall's had left off because the field had not been diminished by space or time. Some readers will likely recognize this as an example of what is generally known as "the hundredth monkey" phenomenon, but these experiments and Sheldrake's interpretation are much more precise.

    </i>
     
  14. Xenu BBS Whore Registered Senior Member

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    706
    Yes the poison could enter the womb of a mother rat bearing children, but I'm guessing the impregnation occured after the poison left her system. That's why I want to read the study, to see if they did it correctly, eliminating confounds. Also note that each additional generation had rats avoiding cranberry juice too (each at 1/2 the frequency as the generation before - there's no way the actual poison was passed down to the grandchildren's wombs.

    Procop,

    Thanks for the details and the link; I want to check out Sheldrake's work. Yes, what you are talking about in terms of collective unconscious could explain these types of experiments and may be a better hypothesis then genetic transmission.

    To those of you who are quick to discredit this type of research without reading the studies, you demonstrate to me Thomas Kuhn's notion of the sciences being resistant to paradigm changes quite well.
     
  15. weebee Registered Senior Member

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    Bless Tomas Kuhn. Yes paradigms are hard to sift. But for me it was more to the fact that I looked for an hour for this study and could not find it, -relying on peer publication to transfer scientific claims to ‘truths’. I do tend to think that science requires scepticism.

    As for the rats. It could be that with breeding the rats in-house they became more manageable, and used to handing making them easier to teach.


    or... [Bertrand Russell, writing with his customary wit and clarity, put it as follows in 1927: The manner in which animals learn has been much studied in recent years, with a great deal of patient observation and experiment.... One may broadly say that all the animals that have been carefully observed have behaved so as to confirm the philosophy in which the observer believed before his observations began. Nay, more, they have all displayed the national characteristics of the observer. Animals studied by Americans rush about frantically, and with an incredible display of bustle and pep, and at last achieve the desired result by chance. Animals observed by Germans sit still and think, and at last evolve the solution out of their inner consciousness. ' from http://www.gaiaguys.net/sheldexpr.htm
     
    Last edited: Jun 9, 2003
  16. Xenu BBS Whore Registered Senior Member

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    706
    Yes skepticism is good in science, but blind skepticism can be as harmful in scientific discovery as blind faith.

    This would only reaffirm what Procop was talking about. Only the first generation would be born outside of the labratory (and most likely ordered from another labratory). The following 33 generations would be born within the same handling conditions. If handling was an issue then they inherited "manageability" from the generations before or from a collective unconscious.

    As for the quote by Russel, he has some truth to his words, but in case of the experiment Procop presented, it doesn't matter if they were in an American laboratory or a German laboratory, because each generation was subject to the same attitude condition. I couldn't imagine the lab getting peppier and more peepier with each generation. Even if it did arousal only affects performance to a certain extent, and if the animal is arroused to much, it has a negative affect on performance.
     
  17. weebee Registered Senior Member

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    I agree ‘blind’ anything is normally fumbling in the dark. ( unlike physical blindness).

    If handling was an issue then they inherited "manageability" from the generations before or from a collective unconscious; not necessarily. We inherit more than our genes from your parents. It could be that like with horses and dogs the offspring model their own behavior on their mother. A foal that is brought up with a well mannered mare, tends to become well mannered because it sees the parents interaction with humans and copies it.

    It would be conceivable that the first mouse scores low because of negative factors of handling and shipping. The first generation scores slightly higher since they are handled more but still experience some negative effects of the parent, and so on. Other factors which should be taken into account are; the effects of having one person handle the mice, nutrition (effect of good nutrition increasing IQ(?) of future generations) and the effect of experimenters expectations.

    The quote by Russel was from one of Sheldrake’s papers (1994). From the same paper ‘The classical experiments on the effects of experimenters' expectations on animals were carried out in the 1960s by Robert Rosenthal and his colleagues. They used students as experimenters and rats as subjects. The rats came from a standard laboratory strain, but were divided at random into two groups, labelled 'Maze-Bright' and 'Maze-Dull'. The students were told that these animals were the products of generations of selective breeding at Berkeley for good and poor performance in standard mazes. The students naturally expected the 'bright' rats to learn quicker than the 'dull' ones. Sure enough, this is what they found. Overall the 'bright' rats made 51 per cent more correct responses and learned 29 per cent faster than the 'dull' rats.’

    I guess this boils down that there seems to be some data which does not fit into the current paradigm, thought I would suggest further exploration of the experimental procedure before proposing a radical alternative, though it’s a nice idea.
     
  18. Xenu BBS Whore Registered Senior Member

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    Although I haven't seen the study Procop was talking about myself, I'm guessing that the offspring were removed from their parents. If not, I agree this is a poor experiment.

    This is very interesting. Do you know what the experimenters proposed to as how the students were affecting the rat's scores?
     
  19. weebee Registered Senior Member

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    To the best of my knowledge, not having read the actual study, Rosenthal proposed that the experimenter was influencing the rats, due to wishing that the experiment would work. I can’t find an account of the actual mechanism, only that Sheldrake says ‘Almost everyone agrees that subtle cues such as gestures, eye movements, body posture and odors can influence people and animals. Sceptics are very keen on emphasizing the importance of such cues, and rightly so.’

    I would say that the research has to be focused onto how much these ‘cues’ influence research, rather than presupposing a collective unconscious. As far as I can see, if this collective unconscious is available to all members, regardless of geography, then what is stopping the rats in the stupid group hooking up, expect the experimenters preconception?

    The well known experiment with the flat worms could be useful for setting a base line for human influence in animal experiments. I think videoing the animals, and asking the observer to count the ‘head turns’, as well as asking people to time behavior. It could be that humans are more ‘primed’ when they think an animal is faster and thus are more accurate in observations.
     

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