Thread by @Freesoilyeah

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reprogram…

Transgenerational epigenetic effects are going to be limited to a few sites that avoid demethylation. Histone rotation, as far as I can tell, is completely reset by meiosis itself. I can't conceive how that would be sustained through that.

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot Now those sites do exist, and there's no shortage of shitlib academics who will copiously document every loci that avoids the germline reset, but perhaps this is why they never give their findings an estimated effect size on an operationalized trait.

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot Like, this epigenetics stuff sorta just floats around as an academic hobby horse used to "debunk racists" and give pseudos some brain candy. But it never reaches policy because it doesn't have any impact. I generally throw wet blankets on environmental interventions, but...

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot things like the abecedarian and perry preschool project showed at least SOMETHING, even if those IQ gains went away shortly after the interventions ended, the academic gains persisted and the kids put in it ended up less criminal. So it had an effect, just not on IQ.

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot In that sense, ye old timey environmental nostrums had some impact. And I think you just haven't experience this. There was a time when equalizing income was the answer, when the IQ tests were biased, when "bad schools" were the problem. But they've gotten more exotic as those

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot explanations failed. Of course this is never relayed to the public, so the public "debate" is just fucking retarded. Then you got into the "stereotype threat" era in the 1990s, and that ended up falling flat after the publication bias fiasco and later failed replications.

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot Then around 2011 you started seeing epigenetics. It's crazy, they're actually starting to look at the genome itself to say race differences in traits aren't a function of genetic differences.

Here's the basic problem for epigenetic effects: something like ~95% of it gets erased

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot ... in the germline. And "intelligence", like height, is a complex trait. GWASes have shown it's almost totally polygenic. Which means there's not going to be some little section of the genome where all the "intelligence" is that doesn't get reset in the germline.

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot And on top of that, the two big environmental factors that have shown in animals to have some intergenerational inheritance - stress and nutrition - either whites do worse on (stress) or it's unclear if the way in which modern nutrition is poor has bad epigenetic effects.

@AnonCandle @mr_plrm @mythinkspot So for the race gaps, first you have to show the way in which poor black nutrition doesn't just cause obesity, but has negative epigenetic effects, and then that these effects are more powerful than the greater stress (as in, stress hormones) whites have.