Fathers’ Choices May Be Packaged and Passed Down in Sperm Rna
Key topics
The notion that fathers' experiences can be encoded in their sperm RNA and passed down to their offspring is sparking a lively debate about the boundaries between Lamarckian and Mendelian genetics. As some commenters point out, this emerging research challenges traditional views of heredity, with one astute observer noting that "Lamarck has entered the chat." While some see this as a vindication of Lamarck's ideas on acquired traits, others caution that there's an "ideological incentive" to embracing Lamarckianism, potentially leading to blaming "lived experience" for societal ills. The discussion is also highlighting the complex interplay between epigenetics, environmental factors, and genetic expression.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Very active discussionFirst comment
34m
Peak period
55
3-6h
Avg / period
12.3
Based on 160 loaded comments
Key moments
- 01Story posted
Dec 27, 2025 at 8:33 PM EST
10 days ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Dec 27, 2025 at 9:06 PM EST
34m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
55 comments in 3-6h
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Dec 29, 2025 at 10:18 PM EST
8 days ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
Want the full context?
Jump to the original sources
Read the primary article or dive into the live Hacker News thread when you're ready.
Lamarckian vs. Mendelian genetics was about heritable traits being acquired in life (Lamarck), or being discrete units passed down at conception (Mendel).
Genetics is almost entirely Mendelian, but some of epigenetics is durable and this Lamarckian.
There's also retroviral integrations, transposons, and all sorts of other complexities that don't fit neatly into boxes.
These are all fundamentally a story of how the individual encounters and uses information in their lived experience. But there is also a very strong consensus narrative that must be respected, but also challenged and evolved. DNA is literally the informational substrate of a life… when you adopt a personal belief, or are subject to someone elses, you have the ability to help but also harm your informational substrate. Tend your garden of ideas with love and care.
okay, I trust this article and source more
where can I keep up with this in more mainstream but technical publications
Quanta Magazine is great! They have a cool YouTube channel as well
seems like a neat premise for sci fi novella
jk.
Honestly, sounds like a great read!
I won't respond further.
I get that saying “boomer ruined the world for all the generations afterwards” is an insult, but the word itself is now considered an insult?
Genuinely asking here; the constantly shifting landscape of what one is allowed to say when talking to US Americans is a bit hard for me to navigate and I currently only have online discourse as guidepost (which is like 1000% more toxic)
As I said elsewhere, there is no single way that boomers behave.
> what one is allowed to say
This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
It's not ageist to have complaints against a specific generation, not the one before, not the one after, with those complaints sticking to that generation as their age changes.
> Whether those complaints are right or wrong on a statistical level is a different issue.
Only because you have made it one. The word "ageist" was the least part of my comment (but there is in fact a strong ageist element to it, contrary to your mischaracterization of the realities of the pejorative use of the term.)
> you yourself recognized this when you asked "Which demographic was casually insulted here
I asked this because boomer was the only possible demographic in GPs post, not because I think the term boomer is pejorative in itself. Chilling and ambition are obviously not demographics but qualities.
> This oft repeated nonsense is bad faith. You're allowed to say whatever you want, and people are allowed to respond.
If you want to go there, this argument is bad faith as well… of course I can say anything, but you seem to be personally offended that the term boomer exists and I simply don’t understand why.
> all statements referring to boomers collectively that aren't purely statistical are pejorative
Is that true for every other age group, so for example is every statement that refers to “millennials” or “zoomers” automatically pejorative and ageist?
In case you don't: "the baby acts like a boomer" is not insulting agaist third children, but it is casually ageist.
It is casually insulting, as in bringing a generally insulting framework into a different topic.
That's not too bad unless you are in a group and they make fun of you right away, but it's a fumble that you can fix and start a good play if you don't just get super nervous.
Laugh it off, ask her if it's not the first one, ask her to join, even if you know she's actually working and can't.
I've never done any improv, but it seems like something maybe everyone should do so we all can avoid awkward moments that stick for way longer than they should.
Savecumming?
It will definitely need 8 scientist relationships, a lot of energy and money.
If "microRNA" profiles have any influence, I would wager it's very small.
I’m pretty sure the first one didn’t have siblings, and the second only had one. Also their mother is not the same person after raising the first kid, or raising two.
Parenting never have reproducible conditions.
Now I’ve got 2 boys, and even at fairly young ages they were very different. I’d say by 6 months old the basics of their personalities were visible, and they haven’t changed vastly as they’ve grown.
I have given up trying to explain child development, there's just too many variables.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4655556/
> No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man
Then you'll probably have kids who resemble Wim Hof
You can study those kids and compare them to the reported lifestyle of the parents at the time before their conception.
Or your worst, since the article also suggests that bad habits can be epigenetically useful to the offspring.
I would hold off reaching any conclusions from this clickbait.
Though I've never had nor wanted kids in the first place anyway.
What can't happen is inter-generational transmission of particular subjective experiences that aren't pared 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.
If that’s not “lived experience,” then I don’t know what is.
>The first is how a father’s body physically encodes lived experience, such as stress, diet, exercise or nicotine use
And that’s a single sentence partway through the article. From the beginning, the refrain is the list of the sorts of things that seem to have heritable effect, not the phrase “lived experiences”.
>Research into how a father’s choices — such as diet, exercise, stress, nicotine use — may transfer traits to his children
>Within a sperm’s minuscule head are stowaway molecules, which enter the egg and convey information about the father’s fitness, such as diet, exercise habits and stress levels, to his offspring
Etc. The article is clearly not attempting to suggest that all experiences are heritable.
What is important is to note that there are many formulas for consciousness. Some are truely bonkers, some are just fundamental truth. And some… have yet to be discovered.
Permutations and combinatorics create a hyperspace of all ridiculous things!
The literature in this area is a mess, has become highly politicized. I’d give it another 10 or so years before I made any strong statements about these effects in humans. Famously the study of Holocaust survivors’ descendants didn’t show transgenerational effects.
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.
queue rationalist fathers microdosing nicotine patches before conception to give their kids the best chance at abusing drugs.
I wound read it as “the drug has less effect” - so in that case you can better abuse these drugs if you are worse at “disarming” them I guess
what is this (opens new tab) phenomenon?!
Not without a new cult spin-off you don't!
I was taken aback to learn my dad did the exact same thing at my age!
Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
I write this here because science does not really work well when it is based on speculation. So this article is weird. It starts by speculating about something rather than analyse the article. It then continues to "textbooks have to be rewritten". Well, I think if you are in science, you need to demonstrate that all your claims made need to be correct - and others can verify it, without any restriction whatsoever.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,” Conine said.
So their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
See this article:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1197258
It was later redacted - a total fabrication. A lie.
> Either it is correct; or it is not. Perhaps it is somewhat correct, but then it may not be fully correct, so it would contain wrong information.
This describes all science and all knowledge; if that's not good enough, nothing is good enough. Everything somewhat correct and somewhat incorrect; the best stuff is much more of the former. Newton's Laws are mostly correct, somewhat incorrect.
> science does not really work well when it is based on speculation
Speculation is the foundation of science: it leads to an hypothesis, which leads to research, which leads to more speculation.
> their theory is incomplete as of yet. That's not good.
That also is the nature of all science. For example, papers include analyses of their own blind spots and weaknesses, and end with suggestions for further research by others.
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
That's also part of science and all human endeavor. If you disallow that, we might as well go back to being illiterate - everything we read is flawed, and inevitably some is wrong.
I don't understand your criticism.
It makes complete sense that the researchers are worried about the research being oversold. It's routine for media to take a scientific finding and grossly exaggerate its impact, i.e. "New research proves you can exercise your way to a fit child" or whatever.
This is science, we don't know if anything is "correct." The more compelling the research, the more we can adjust our priors as to what is "correct."
> There are examples of where theories were lateron shown to be wrong.
There are also lots of examples where theories were later not shown to be wrong. What's your point?
I hard disagree. Your comment to me reads as if a paper should either prove a new theory or disprove an existing theory.
However, publishing new results without a clear understanding of how it works is just as valid and this seems to be that. In Phsyics and Astronomy, new observations are often published without a theory of how it works. This is not a bad thing, that is part of the collaborative nature of science. The same holds true for papers suggesting a new theory, but lacking either observational or theoretical proof.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
So good habits can be good for offspring.
> For instance, mouse fathers exposed to nicotine(opens a new tab) sire male pups with livers that are good at disarming not just nicotine but cocaine and other toxins as well.
So bad habits can be good for offspring.
> “We just don’t have really any understanding of how RNAs can do this, and that’s the hand-wavy part,”
It seems to me to all be the handwavy part. I'm happy to wait until the research is considerably further advanced, past the clickbait stage.
But yet humanity has managed to assert statistical truths about for example genetics and explain countless diseases, even cure and alleviate some. So even if you don’t have a theory on how exactly something works from the ground up, if you have statistical evidence, plenty of useful and practical advances can be built top-bottom and we have outcomes that validate this.
That is partly because no one seems willing to summarize this work, in concise form, for nonspecialists. Such a summary might be, "This is an important finding, but it doesn't mean Lysenko was right, and the term 'inheritance' doesn't have just one meaning."
I think the term "inheritance" for both DNA and epigenetic information transfers (as in the linked article) is innately confusing.
Some trees have mechanisms, for instance, where they die quickly but signal other trees if exposed to certain issues, allowing the other trees to put up a better defense.
Ants and other insects sometimes do the same thing.
Essentially a ‘jumps on the grenade’ gene.
It doesn't, but the article doesn't go into this detail, so people unfamiliar with the field wouldn't understand why. The keyword is epigenetics. I.e. how certain genes become activated or deactivated through behaviour and/or environmental influences. But the DNA sequence itself remains unaltered. So no evolution necessary. There are basically a bunch of molecules than sit on top of your DNA that regulate gene expression. They don't just tell a cell to behave like a skin cell or a brain cell, they also regulate the entire cellular metabolism. The discovery that male sperm can also transmit this epigenetic information to offspring is relatively new, but now that we know that, it makes total sense that these gene-expression-modifying behaviours in fathers could affect their children. After all, they simply get to start with a good (or bad) bunch of epigenetic markers. They will not persist across many generations though, so it has no real long term effect on evolution. It may even be an evolved mechanism that allows organisms to respond to environmental changes on timeframes that would be prohibited by evolution.
Obviously "immune" is a humorous exaggeration, but I'm not sure we have data to rule out the idea that this cohort has increased tolerance to some environmental toxins.
So, it's possible the level of harm we see today is already "post-" this protective effect.
He means that the hippie generation and disco generation took a lot of drugs.
Also, there were plenty of non-"drug" toxins people were exposed to where levels peaked around that time — leaded gasoline, early food contact plastics with unsafe additives, pesticides that are now banned, etc. But thanks Nancy Reagan. :)
Allergies and cancer are way up.
There’s multiple causes behind those, this is almost certainly one.
Also there are the very known costs of nicotine damaging sperms, or of course being in literal smoke as a child (or adult) and deal with those real effects.
These mechanisms of epigenetic inheritance or whatever need much more study. It is far too early to draw any conclusions other than we need to keep researching.
Nicotine is on-par with caffeine in isolation.
It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
I was surprised to learn nicotine is used by functional doctors to treat CFS-adjacent conditions, and the mechanisms behind this.
let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
“Significantly” is an opinion.
It’s more toxic by weight, yes.
Messes with vascular more than caffeine.
Both are an excellent way to screw up heart health.
> let’s not get started on the CFS stuff, treatments for functional disorders are often placebo-resembling.
Personally haven’t needed or wanted to use nicotine, but I have recovered from an array of chronic illnesses; I’ll get started on anything I please, thanks,
especially seeing how many of my peers are hopelessly exhausted and existing on abusive amounts of caffeine/prescription stimulants to get by.
but for your information, one last question:
does your opinion cover patents who have blood test results showing Lyme, and one or more known coinfections like Bab, Bart,
or are you another Reddit regurgitation expert?
Plain black coffee has, somewhat surprisingly, been repeatedly demonstrated to be very healthy - with substantial reductions in all-cause mortality as well as the chances of developing cardiovascular disease. I tend to live somewhat spartanly in terms of consumption, and wanted to drop my coffee habit, but looking up the data on it left me dropping that idea real fast.
If you’re grinding your own (mycotoxins are real), hard to find a cleaner healthier form of caffeine than coffee!
Lots of morning-and-day soda and energy drink consumers. More than we even see, assuredly.
I certainly didn't; I simply quoted a sentence from the article. (I've noticed that some people have difficulty distinguishing between the person who quotes something and the person being quoted ... it might be a Sally-Anne effect.)
> It’s the rest of the crap in smokes and vapes to be concerned with.
Yes, which makes this article even less reliable.
an unquoted section.
You can attribute that opinion to the author, or society, or whoever now, if you choose,
regardless my point remains: nicotine shouldn’t be filed under “bad habit” by default.
Seriously?
I can't take this as anything other than bad faith.
The only purpose mouse models serve is to fill the popular press with sensational findings and torture a lot of mice.
But a lot of life-saving medicaments and techniques started as mouse testings, including Penicillin, cancer drugs and the polio vaccine.
27 more comments available on Hacker News