New research from Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA.

During the tests they learned that that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences - in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom - to subsequent generations.

According to the Telegraph, Dr Brian Dias, from the department of psychiatry at Emory University, said: "From a translational perspective, our results allow us to appreciate how the experiences of a parent, before even conceiving offspring, markedly influence both structure and function in the nervous system of subsequent generations.

"Such a phenomenon may contribute to the etiology and potential intergenerational transmission of risk for neuropsychiatric disorders such as phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder."
original journal article:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v17/n1/full/nn.3594.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbPwzII_g6o
This suggests that experiences are somehow transferred from the brain into the genome, allowing them to be passed on to later generations. The researchers now hope to carry out further work to understand how the information comes to be stored on the DNA in the first place.

Professor Marcus Pembrey, a paediatric geneticist at University College London, said the work provided "compelling evidence" for the biological transmission of memory.

He added: "It addresses constitutional fearfulness that is highly relevant to phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders, plus the controversial subject of transmission of the 'memory' of ancestral experience down the generations.

"It is high time public health researchers took human transgenerational responses seriously." "I suspect we will not understand the rise in neuropsychiatric disorders or obesity, diabetes and metabolic disruptions generally without taking a multigenerational approach."

Professor Wolf Reik, head of epigenetics at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge, said, however, further work was needed before such results could be applied to humans.

He said: "These types of results are encouraging as they suggest that transgenerational inheritance exists and is mediated by epigenetics, but more careful mechanistic study of animal models is needed before extrapolating such findings to humans."

As the original journal article published in the prestigious journal Nature concludes, "Our findings provide a framework for addressing how environmental information may be inherited transgenerationally at behavioral, neuroanatomical and epigenetic levels."

Could our DNA be carrying spiritual and mystical memories passed down in genes from the experiences of our ancestors? Does something such as spiritual evolution fester its way into the genetic sequence and carry over into the next generation? We now have a scientific framework for answering these questions.

Thank you Moe for pointing out his very interesting study and article. Looks like I am behind in my reading.

something i've always thought, seems to me that evolution wouldn't happen without it... glad they are studying it now...

.. embedded information.. to be used at a later date...bingo... gold star for you..

seems to make sense, if we think about how an animal knows to stay away from certain things... if a rat sees another rat get eaten by a snake, then it's children knows to be weary of snakes...

.. no need for expensive gas.. our ship

.. in effect we are doing that right now. sending messages through space and time. albeit.. limited space

I guess it works for things like famine too. When the body is famished, it shuts down some normal metabolism and converts food o sugar and fat for more available use. So kids born through mothers during a farm crop plague or drought have obesity and blood sugar problems, and it goes at least 3-4 generations down. Some think it goes even more precise than that- that the moment of conception is very vulnerable for the new cells, that they will be effected by environmental factors in the immediate area as well. I So, petri dish reproduction is thought t be risky because the cell is exposed to the environment more than without a third party delivery system.

.. so the cells are uploading information...hmm..

No, the info doesn't come from the cells, they are meaningless ingredients. But as this is a science forum, I will not speak further about the matter.

why not?

Not wishing to sound rude and perhaps I have miss-understood the post but I would have thought this was obvious anyway.
How else would a young antelope know that he needs to run away when he see's a lion for instance.

yes, my thoughts exactly.. even the symbiotic relationships between plants, insects and animals would all be these same memories...

I'm convinced cancer is in our DNA.
There's a professor called David Lane who is studying it now.
I'm not saying our DNA carries cancer, but I think some peoples DNA is open to cancer more than others.

Slightly off topic but there you go

I'm convinced cancer is in our DNA.
There's a professor called David Lane who is studying it now.
I'm not saying our DNA carries cancer, but I think some peoples DNA is open to cancer more than others.

Slightly off topic but there you go

Any references brah?

Well, I just feel that there is an energy that sorta starts clinging to the cells, but that the cells don't really have a sentient existence, in the slightest sense, until about 40 days. But science today is concerned with only the physical. So you could only talk about DNA and nutrients, but sometimes even deprived mothers will birth a healthy babe, and I think it is because there was a certain energy which just superseded the deficiencies, that liked that bundle of cells for some tendency in the nature of the energy itself. DNA is passed down, know doubt about how cells divide and use DNA as a instruction set- that is physical biology. But I am saying that there is something beyond the physical, that is not in our science, even though it is likely scientific in reasoning. It is sort of how relativity is a physical theory, but that we have all this dark stuff around. Maybe it is just a word for saying we really have no idea, but there is this deficit. So just as i imagine that a broad theory which includes some weird dynamics, some nothingness and creation events, will need to be proposed, and as a soliloquy to this idea, there would be room for a type of non physical attachment of energy which changes how the new organism will start to add resources to itself. So it is bogus because I can't really explain it, so what good are the thoughts? But I don't rule out that such explanations are able to be conveyed, and if science is adjustable enough, will someday be incorporated into it, if physics really does want to be the king of studies, the deepest level that the limits of the mind can go to.

Cancer, like a few other unsolvable illnesses is the result of your cells doing exactly what they're supposed to do...but under conditions in which doing so is unhealthy.

ie. cancer is like a fry pan into the fire situation, it's a correct response to jump out of the fry pan yet by doing so you wind up in the fire.
They're a cellular mutation, conditional from a stem cell perspective not so much hereditary, but the act of trying to be healthy causes the body to destroy itself, a bit like a crazy person in a crowd when the crowd starts to wonder who is really the crazy one, so what happens is more crazy people in that crowd until the whole crowd is crazy. But in this case crazy is dead.

Lots of confounding illnesses work this way, mental illness for example, works just like this. It is because a brain is perfectly healthy that it becomes mentally ill, not because something is wrong with it. The causal influences are conditional.

ie. nobody is really born broken, it's a completely fallacious, popular assumption.

..so cells are meaningless ingredients..hmm... yeah that makes sense.. cells have the ability to react. to their environment... so you could say they're uploading information...hmm

A lot of cancers are hereditary, especially if two or more people in your family have had the same cancer then it can be.
Or if someone in your family under the age of 40 has cancer then again it can be hereditary.