Am 27.12.2014 um 22:33 schrieb meekerdb:
On 12/27/2014 12:05 AM, Evgenii Rudnyi wrote:
I should say that I am not an expert in this issue, however I have
found the paper entertaining. The history of Samuel Butler is
quite interesting. Butler in 19th century held that heredity and
brain memory both involved the storage of information and that the
two forms of storage were the same. Now there are even more papers
along this line, see for example the abstract
DNA methylation and memory formation
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v13/n11/abs/nn.2666.html
"Memory formation and storage require long-lasting changes in
memory-related neuronal circuits. Recent evidence indicates that
DNA methylation may serve as a contributing mechanism in memory
formation and storage."
Notice how vague "may serve as a contributing mechanism" is. He
starts the paper by claiming that memory must be at the molecular
level because it "lasts a lifetime", BUT the only molecule that is
persistent over that span is DNA. So he's skipped right over the
possibility of structural persistence of neural networks. He might
as well have concluded that memory is in bones, because "the last a
lifetime". But then when he tries to imagine a way of coding
information in DNA the only possibility if methylation. Unfortunately
for his theory he finds methylation is "dynamic" (which he would have
called "unstable" except that would make his hypothesis obviously
wrong). The whole paper is speculation to support and conclusion
that was assumed at the beginning.
I would agree that the idea is vague. Yet, scientists discuss it and
this is not the only paper in this direction, Google Scholar shows that
this theme is quite popular nowadays.
The main point here is that what these scientists claim is close to
Butler's ideas. An interesting twist in thinking especially if to
observe it from historical perspective.
Evgenii
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