Will Wikipedia still claim that intergenerational trauma can be passed down via a physiological mechanism in January of 2025?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_trauma

Specifically, to resolve YES, the claim must be that:

  • The child has some specific (potentially unconcious) knowledge of the world event that occured, which can influence their behavior or emotional reaction to it.

  • This knowledge came through the child's genetics, epigenetics, or other transit mechanism that happened prior to the child's birth and came directly from the mother's body.

This is contrast to social transmission mechanisms, such as talking to the child about it, the child noticing the reaction of other humans to the event, or other "learned" behavior.

Wikipedia doesn't need to state that this mechanism is known with certainty, just that it seems likely.

I'll ignore vandalism and other edits that only last a short amount of time.

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gamete production resets all epigenetics so this is not possible to have these effects further back than when your mother was a fetus.

I like how the market probability matches the Gott's Theorem probability

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument

I think the wikipedia page has suggested that transgenerational trauma could be epigenetic for 9 years, so the probability that it still suggests it in 2 years is

1/(1+(2/9)) = ~.818

The Wiki article leans mostly on mother-to-child uterine transmission. Your linked post doesn’t give reasons to remove that – it questions a different mechanism, grandparent-to-grandchildren epigenetics.

From Wikipedia:

The primary modes of transmission are the uterine environment during pregnancy

Obviously, Substack is not a Wikipedia source of choice, but the post refers to (a few) academic publications. The same distinction is even clearer and more succinct there. Specifically, as far as I can tell, Horsthemke questions grandparent-to-grandchildren transmission via epigenetics – not mother-to-child physiological effects, e.g. “[it] is not due to the transmission of epigenetic information through the maternal germline, but a direct consequence of the exposure in utero”.

Additionally, there needs to be an abundance of strong, good sources for Wikipedia editors to completely rewrite the presentation of transgenerational transmission. Again, from Horsthemke, in the final sentence:

[The] evidence for transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, as laid out above, is not (yet) conclusive. For now, I remain skeptical.

This may be enough to add a “for reasons X and Y, evidence for this specific theory is questioned by Z.” It’s not enough to remove the description of the grandparent studies. There’s a bit more elsewhere, but my overall priors for the speed and volume of this kind of research and review are low. Before academia comes to any strong conclusion either way, and some undergrads find time to volunteer for rewriting the Wiki articles instead of working on their diploma, it may well be 2050.

Which sections or quotes in the Wikipedia article would you say currently most support the claim that intergenerational trauma can be passed down via a physiological mechanism?

Uh, lots of it? It's all over the article.

DNA methylation can act as the mechanism for the transmission of intergenerational trauma.

Stress can be biologically transmitted across generations through the uterine environment.

DNA methylation can act as the mechanism for the transmission of intergenerational trauma.

predictedYES

@IsaacKing Ok, cool. I think I was setting a higher bar for what would count as “specific […] knowledge of the world event that occured”

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