Timeline for How realistic is a genetic memory?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 31, 2023 at 14:15 | history | edited | LSerni | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 1212 characters in body
|
| Sep 11, 2020 at 22:19 | comment | added | DWKraus | This is a good in-depth article on this question. Sort of memory, but it's a stretch. Planaria is the best example of it, though. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5051648 | |
| Sep 11, 2020 at 22:04 | comment | added | DWKraus | Pretty sure the memory in this case is gene regulation. It's memory in the same way moving furniture in your living room is - you walk the same way around the furniture after you move it, even if you don't "remember" moving the furniture. Someone else moving the furniture gives the same results. They are so primitive, it's hard to be sure. | |
| Sep 10, 2020 at 9:29 | comment | added | Quan To | Flatworms don't have brains. They have nerve nets, which is distributed throughout their body. The heads of the flatworms do contain ganglia, but that doesn't mean the ganglia is important for storing memory. | |
| Sep 8, 2020 at 22:02 | comment | added | LSerni | @cowlinator no, they are small DNA strands that are organized circularly. They are more commonly called circular replicons. | |
| Sep 8, 2020 at 18:43 | comment | added | cowlinator |
What are DNA circles? Do you mean mitochondrial DNA?
|
|
| Sep 7, 2020 at 22:26 | comment | added | Palbitt | ...any matches on the invading viruses. (Sorry for the two comments, I couldn't make it any briefer.) | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 22:25 | comment | added | Palbitt | There's another real-life example of this: CRISPR! The gene editing method was inspired by the behavior of certain bacteria. When a bacterium gets infected by a virus and survives, it takes snippets of the virus's genetic code and stores it in its own genome, buffered by formatted DNA like HTML blocks. (CRISPR stands for "Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" and is not the same as the stuff we use, the enzyme Cas9.) That's a form of memory. When it or its progeny get infected again with the virus, the enzyme Cas9 will read that sequence and attack... | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 21:03 | comment | added | Chronocidal | @MatthewDaly That sounds more like the "Other Memory" was always present in humans (constant 'writing'), and the Bene Gesserit were special in that they could access them (limited 'reading'), but the females lacked a key.. Key... to 'unlock' or 'decode' the male ones (e.g. needing an X chromosome to decode female, and the Y chromosome to decode male - missing 'codec') | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 16:02 | comment | added | Matthew Daly | This sounds a lot like the concept of "Other Memory" in Dune, where the Reverend Mothers of the Bene Gesserit could access the memory of their female ancestors. Of course, it breaks down with the introduction of Paul Atreides since it wouldn't explain how Paul (and subsequently Leto II) can access the Other Memory of their male ancestors... | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 12:54 | comment | added | John | Keep in mind the "memory" obtained in flatworms is simply tolerance of light regulated by a single gene, And only a faster learning rate of it, they still had to be trained again and suppressor proteins that could still be present in the other tissues could easily explain the quick retraining. It is not as big a deal as the media makes it out to be. | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 11:34 | vote | accept | Qoray | ||
| Sep 7, 2020 at 11:32 | history | edited | LSerni | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 1480 characters in body
|
| Sep 7, 2020 at 11:19 | comment | added | LSerni | @JonathanBöcker the reason is probably in the memory organization of the organism. Flatworms have "chemical" memory. Humans have an electroneurochemical memory and, if the Penrose-Hameroff OOR theory is to be believed, a sort of quantum "cache" on top of that. There is no immediately evident reason for a higher organism not to have a DNA-based chemical "hard disk" and an OOR fast layer booting off it. Memory transfer would be complicated, hallucinatory or even insanity-inducing, or a mixture of those. | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 9:17 | comment | added | Qoray | Do you think, that this is also possible for more complex organisms? Or is the relative simplicity of the flatworm brain the reason that they can do this? | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 9:16 | comment | added | Qoray | wow I have never heard of that :) That is super interesting! Thank you very much! | |
| Sep 7, 2020 at 8:47 | history | edited | LSerni | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 495 characters in body
|
| Sep 7, 2020 at 8:42 | history | answered | LSerni | CC BY-SA 4.0 |