“Who controls the past, controls the future”
- George Orwell, 1984
Entropy and evolution are often seen as two organizing principles of the universe. Entropy is thought to dictate the direction of time, while evolution is thought to, in turn, describe the change and eventual adaptation of living things through time to their mutable environments. In a sense, evolution has crystallized the particular direction of time (as far as earthly organisms are concerned) in its tracks, and defined time by the passage of these small adaptive changes. In parallel to these principles, there is the evolution of culture and knowledge, with storytelling and language being the vessel for their cross and intergenerational transfer. Analyzing how exactly these concepts intertwine leads to a more wholistic and probing account of how cultural narratives, and the knowledge they bear, relate to biological narratives that are physically and entropically dictated.
The prospect of transmitting our own experiences to our offspring is jarring, but seemingly intuitive. Epigenetics, literally meaning “above genes”, describes the physical imprints our experiences can have on the expression of genes to yield more environmentally adaptive traits. Transgenerational Epigenetic Inheritance (TEI) describes the transmission of these imprints independent of the genetic code inherited. That is, the learning achieved by our forebears, irrespective of their genetic predispositions, is ripples through multiple generations under the auspices of TEI. This transgenerational transmission seemingly defies the very notion that there are boundaries between segments of time and space, as well as subjective memories. Instead of dying with the individual, experiences — memories — seem to live on. As such, if we are to accept the possibility of TEI, the consciousness our ancestors develop seems to leave an impregnable mark on our offspring, and we are still far from a complete understanding of how that is the case.
My aim for this paper is three-pronged. Firstly, I wish to elucidate the behavioral and biological mechanisms for evolution, putting pressure on viewing evolution as a strictly physical organizing principle. Secondly, I wish to challenge innate capacities for agential decisions. Thirdly, I wish to identify future research avenues for the discussed systems of heredity. The difference inheritance systems I will be discussing are behavioral/cultural, symbolic and biological. I will be reconciling the behavioral, cultural, and symbolic hereditary system to the latter in order to draw attention to the more insidious and long-lasting impacts of oppression and injustice. This understanding will hopefully shed light on how exactly we can honor the UN Charter in saying that “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrows ..." – how can we salvage generations from the scars of their ancestor’s traumatic experiences?
History of Biological Evolution:
Lamarckism is a theory of evolution introduced by Jean Baptiste Lamarck in the 18thcentury claiming that acquired physical traits can be transmitted to future generations. Its central tenet is the principle of use and disuse, meaning that the prolonged and efficacious use of a trait will lead to its prevalence, whereas the vestigiality of a trait will cause it to eventually fade out. This theory rests on what he thought of as a “natural tendency toward perfection” (Lamarck, 1809), whereby use can change a trait and these beneficial traits amount to an ongoing teleological tendency. A popular example often given is that of a giraffe stretching its neck to obtain nutrients leading to its offspring having elongated necks, thereby increasing their chances of survival. A more subtle case would be the increased dexterity acquired by a musician through practice that one would think could lead to a heightened disposition to music playing on their offspring. He believed that new needs are constantly arising in animals as a result of changing environments and that each creature strives towards some teleological endpoint. The evolution of life, in this paradigm, consists of the accumulation of small gradual changes and the subsequent inheritance of these acquired characteristics. In turn, how we interact – how we behave—is a product and instrument of inheritance.
This view was largely discredited by proponents of Darwinism and the birth of hereditary genetics, though interestingly not by Charles Darwin himself. Darwinian evolution’s bread and butter is random mutations that are selected for, and then over time the buildup of these competitive mutations leads to macroscopic changes in organisms. Humans, along with other organisms, are hence the product of a long line of these adaptive changes, amounting to what Darwin terms “descent with modification” (Gerbault et al, 2014). This idea, coined “Natural Selection” is famously non-teleological and maintains that mutations arising randomly in some members of the species yield more adaptive characteristics according to certain selection pressures and then these members survive and breed. Natural Selection can be summarized in terms of three key principles: variation, differential fitness, and inheritance (Gerbault et al, 2014). In other words, there will be naturally occurring genetic differences arising from alleles and mutations, between individuals of a given species, and some will be more likely to survive and reproduce. The genetic underpinnings of these advantageous differences must then be heritable and reliably passed on to the next generation.
As such, rather than explaining evolution by the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as the Lamarckian model does, the Darwinian model of evolution regards reproductive success as the primary engine of evolution. That being said, the rate of random DNA sequence mutations appears to be insufficient to explain the full suite of genetic variation. Our phenotypes, which is the biological term for our observable characteristics, seem to diverge at a far more rapid rate than the slow rate of natural selection, a point that Darwin himself acknowledges in Origins of Species. Nonetheless, Neo-Darwinist tendencies persist in believing that human nature is fundamentally explicable by fixed biological information. Richard Dawkins, one such proponent, in his book harps on the preeminence of Darwinian evolution The Blind Watchmaker:
“Darwinism is the only known theory that is in principle capable of explaining certain aspects of life. If I am right it means that, even if there were no actual evidence in favor of the Darwinian theory (there is, of course) we should still be justified in preferring it over all rival theories.”
The non-teleological model of biological evolution, however, roots the development of species across time as a matter of unconscious, unstoppable adaptation. From a phenomenological standpoint, it makes us victims of a mindset contending that our ways are dictated by millennia of genetic pruning that does not in essence care about us as individuals, but rather about the multiplicity of the fittest genes.
Darwinian evolution was corroborated by the contemporaneous geneticist Gregor Mendel, who discovered the genetic cornerstones of biological inheritance. In a series of experiments looking at multiple generations of pea plants and tracking their phenotypes, Mendel deduced that genes are inherited as distinct units that appear in offspring as either dominant or recessive traits. It is through inheriting these units, called alleles (specific versionsof genes) that traits are passed on from the parental generation to their offspring. As a matter of pure chance in the genetic hardware, mutations can arise in these alleles, which forms the basis of variation. The mutations replicate and then become the heritable units passed on to future generations. Many can lead to diseases or other disabilities, but some aberrations can be advantageous to the individual’s survival, yielding enhanced fitness. The thought is that these individuals would on average have more reproductive success and increase the prevalence of said alleles in the subsequent generation. Seeing as these two discoveries—Natural Selection and Genetic Heritability—naturally cohere, more modern-day biologists unified them in what is referred to as the “Modern Synthesis”.
To build on the Modern Synthesis, another scientific discovery that further ratified Darwinian evolution is the discovery of the structure of DNA, the “Double Helix”, by Rosalind Franklin, Francis Crick and James Watson. The Double Helix bridges the microscopic and macroscopic by connecting the molecules that constitute DNA with their phenotypes that manifest themselves in the observable physical characteristics Darwin and Mendel harped on. Namely, DNA consists of sequences of nucleotide bases and a specific sequence of these nucleotide bases corresponds to a gene. The sum product of these genes comprises our genome, or genotype, and, from this “blueprint,” our cells can manufacture the proteins that make us who we are. This process of transcribing DNA to RNA, the language of our genome, and then translating it to proteins is ironically known as the “Central Dogma” of biology, as all higher order processes rely on this simple conveyor belt. The name also lends itself to an agreement largely facilitated by Watson and Crick that this genetic code is immutable and genes alone (and their respective signaling cascades) can explain all human behavior. The Central Dogma is hence the key pentacle of modern-day genetic determinism. Taken together, the Modern Synthesis armed with the central dogmas of modern genetics has been viewed as sufficient textbook explanations of human nature.
Non-Biological Inheritance:
Dawkins, along with his staunch adherence to Darwinian evolution and his theory of gene replication posited in the “Selfish Gene”, also christened the concept of a “meme” as a vehicle of evolution. According to Dawkins, memes are the fundamental unit of cultural inheritance, and hence the modern day “replicators” driving evolution. In his own words, memes are “unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and as naturally selected by virtue of its ‘phenotypic’ consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment” (Dawkins, 1976). Of course, being in the physicalist reductionist camp, he believes that memes themselves have neurological underpinnings that are themselves phenotypic effects of a neural genotype. Memes can be perceived by the sense organs of other individuals, imprinted on their brains and then passed on to future generations, engraving itself in the receiving brain. Memes then compete, in a sense, to engrave themselves in our brains and be passed on, such as what the best idea, catchiest tune or tastiest recipe is. As a result, just as Dawkins maintains genes are “selfish” replicators by sometimes undermining the survival and reproductive success of their carriers in order to maximize its net survival rate, memes, too, can selfishly undermine the individual harboring it, while benefiting its own survival and replication. Think of cigarette smoking for example: smoking is pernicious for the individual adopting the “meme”, but hugely beneficial to the meme (cigarette smoking) itself (Jablonka, 2014). Thus, beyond sequences of nucleotides that replicate, cultural units we harbor and live by every day employ the same Darwinian model of survival of the fittest through inheritance, inheritance just being a byproduct of meme and gene proliferation.
That being said, the means for propagation diverges from a strictly biological model and is notable, even if the underlying logic of its propagation may be the same. Memes are thought to broadcast themselves by being communicated through symbolic representations, such as language. This symbolic system of meme transmission and inheritance has in this day and age, according to Dawkins, forced the genetic system of inheritance to take the backseat of evolution. Though it may seem obvious, for a pattern of information to be transmittedit has to be displayed. Especially when it comes to latent information, symbols are our only means of communication. You can appraise, or punish, situations through language instilling norms and general evaluations of matters. More than just an invention, symbols, and language itself, are as Steven Pinker describes, an instinct we have to share our knowledge with others (Pinker,1994) and transfer memes, rather than strictly genes, across a generation. Learning the reception of these memes, in turn, becomes an agent of evolution, where those who learn and synthesize the information transmitted to them effectively have a sociological, and hence biological, advantage.
To reiterate this point more concretely, the inheritance of memes can be viewed as the social and cultural that travel somewhat timelessly across generational lines. From a sociological standpoint, a hallmark of social and cultural evolution is niche construction, the idea that species transform their habitats based on their habits and behavior. In terms of Darwinian inheritance, this subsequently leads to new selection pressures that can influence natural selection. Epidemiologist Jack James states that “such ecosystem engineering bequeaths an ecological inheritance to subsequent generations”, whereby the altered selection pressures of the inherited ecology may be capable of producing evolutionary change. The authors are proposing a symmetrical relationship in adaptation wherein organisms can adapt to their environments and vice versa, resulting in a bidirectional relationship between the genotype and phenotype. Along this vein, human ecological inheritance is linked to human social and cultural proclivities that operate on human evolution in parallel with biological factors (James, 2016). These social and cultural habits emerge from the human capacity to emulate and learn as described above. The upshot of this process of emulation and learning is what constitutes a given cultural profile, all the while, indispensably subsisting on the symbolic systems of language and communication.
Hence, although physicalist models of evolution are compelling to say the least, there seems to be so much more to the story. To this end, the German philosopher Cassirer in An Essay On Mancontends:
“…this world [the human world] forms no exception to those biological rules which govern the life of all the other organisms. Yet in the human world we find a new characteristic which appears to be the distinctive mark of human life. The functional circle of man is not only qualitatively enlarged; it has also undergone a qualitative change. Man has, as it were, discovered a new method of adapting himself to his environment. Between the receptor system and the effector system, which are to be found in all animal species, we find in man a third link which we may describe as the symbolic system. This new acquisition transforms the whole of human life. As compared with the other animals, man lives not merely in a broader reality; he lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality”
As this quote insinuates, there is a distinction between the organic reactions that constitute the Central Dogma and the human responses to the phenotypes they generate. These human responses are the outcome of thought, and thought is the output of what I conceive of as the self. Thus, even if the realm of human response is overlaid on top of the more reductionist realm, it goes without saying that the symbolic system qua language, especially, has transformed how we think of evolution as not just adaptation on a biological level as a means of survival, but adaptation on the level of the multidimensional persistence of thought, and hence, self. Selfish genes can henceforth be understood as selfish insofar as they promote the endurance of the self.
The language instinct and the symbolic system it resides in were not only created as a means for the endurance of the self, changing the payoff of sociality and hence meme-sharing for individuals and groups, but they also feedback onthe self. In the words of linguist Daniel Dor, “First we invented language. Then language changed us”. Language has allowed humans to learn from each other and cooperate and compete between through understanding one another, and the world, more fully. (Dor, 2016) This intuitively makes sense, since on a uni- or even multi-generational level, language can alter our cognition, vocal and auditory systems, but even beyond that, it can also alter our emotions, behavior and our interpretation of our experiences. The ability to communicate and also seek the communication of ideas outside our experiential reach has only nurtured this insatiable desire for truth in humans. This desire has henceforth only been augmented by technological advancements, thereby becoming more impatient and demanding.
As shown in the foregoing paragraphs, despite the prominent biological narratives characterizing evolution, in recent years there has been an acknowledgement of a perhaps richer and more intuitive model of evolution, one that assumes phenotypic plasticity driven by culture and symbolic representations. Genes, as the organic replicators, and memes as the cultural, more transcendent, replicators—whether traveling via sexual reproduction or language respectively—amount to a seemingly satisfactory synthesis of separate narratives that describe how different kinds of units can evolve and be inherited much more holistically than either of the constitutive parts alone can achieve.
Epigenetics and Coming Full Circle:
So far, we have gathered, on the one hand, that biological traits are inherited quaalleles and random mutations culminate in variations that can cause some alleles to prevail more than others, leading to evolution of species via survival of the fittest variant. On the other hand, we’ve gathered that cultural units qua memes can be transmitted via language in a way that adds to the biological narrative by including the component of human response, thought and, thus, the endurance of self. That being said, these parallel narratives rest on a fatal assumption, namely that they are separaterather than intricately connected. As discussed previously, it is understood that genotypes bear on phenotypes and these phenotypes can plasticize according to the transmission of cultural units or “memes”, but the relationship between the genotype and phenotype is still considered to be largely immutable. That is, the plasticity of the phenotype is, under the models described above, assumed to have no bearing on the way the genotype is expressed, localizing the plasticity only to the realm of behavior.
With this in mind, what if Watson and Crick were misled in thinking that these genetic changes were immutable—set in stone? Beyond the genome and the proteome, recent evidence suggests there is also what is referred to as a “second genetic code”, namely the epigenome. The epigenome refers to biological changes made in response to the environment that impact the expression of genes and alters how they are read, i.e. the relationship between the genotype and the phenotype. This added layer of gene regulation, one that is governed by our experiences, adds to the complexity and uniqueness of information in living systems. It speaks to the plasticity of nature in allowing for subtle changes induced by our environments to manifest themselves throughout our lives not only through behavior, but through gene regulation. For example, childhood abuse, trauma or famine could have long term consequences for the functioning of our genes and may be the hidden cause of many psychiatric disorders. Epigenetics promises to seal the rift that logically arises between the two narratives, thereby also reconciling the age-old debate of nature versus nurture.
One of the most famous pieces of evidence for epigenetic changes are presented by identical twin studies. Indeed, if all that mattered was the sequences of the Central Dogma. identical twins, sharing the exact same DNA by definition, would continue to be identical for the rest of their lives. This is obviously not the case. Each twin is subject to a myriad of stimuli that induce bio-chemical cascades regulating gene expression and, as such, the particular constraints and parameters acting on the actualization of their blueprint is constantly informed by the outside world. The inevitably different external stimuli that each twin face result in diverging epigenomes and, thus, phenotypes—despite identical genomes.
The above case pertains to epigenetic changes that occur over one lifetime, but what about epigenetic changes that traverse lifetimes? This concept, briefly described above as TEI, considers an uncanny mechanism through which epigenetic changes can travel intergenerationally. TEI is contentious and against the evolutionary grain as it defies a fundamental principle of biology, namely the impenetrability of the Weisman barrier (Sharma et al, 2016). Briefly, the Weisman barrier refers to the divide between the soma (what makes up an individual and can be epigenetically modified), and the germline (what is inherited by future generations). Until recently, the assumption was that epigenetic changes, enforced by epigenetic markers such as methylation, are acquired throughout an individual’s lifetime and then erased in the zygote, so that the next generation starts on a blank slate.
A frequently cited example of TEI comes from babies that are born to mal-nourished mothers. Studies have shown that these babies gain weight more easily than babies who had received proper nourishment and, further, gene specific methylation patterns were observed (Radford et al, 2014; Geraghty et al, 2015). Specifically, in a study conducted in 2014, it was found that mothers who were malnourished during pregnancy gave birth to children (F1) who had low birth weight and multiple metabolic defects. These metabolic phenotypes were inherited by the subsequent generation (F2) even if the F1 generation had not directly experienced malnourishment or other perturbation (Radford et al, 2014).
TEI has also been identified in descendants of communities who underwent severe trauma or starvation. One classic example is the Dutch “Hunger Winter” of 1944-1945, a period of intense starvation when the Dutch were cut off from food supplies by the Germans. Along with causing many deaths in the generation immediately impacted by the hunger, the famine also spread its tentacles across subsequent generations. Descendants of mothers and fathers who underwent the Dutch Hunger Winter had higher levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol, both linked to conditions such as obesity, diabetes and schizophrenia (Zimmer et al, 2014). Further, according to research conducted by L.H Lumey at Columbia University, people who had been in utero during the famine died at a higher rate than people born before or afterward, a reported 10% increase in mortality (Ekamper et al, 2013). One proposed mechanism is that the Dutch Hunger Winter added a methyl group to a gene called PIM3, which is involved in boosting your metabolism, and methylation of this gene decreases its expression, thereby hindering your metabolism. This hypothesis is, however, disputed and a lot of evidence is due before TEI can be vindicated.
Other foci of TEI research have been the study of aspects of behavior associated with emotionality, and the physiological systems associated with the stress response, such as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. One component of the stress response is a surge of specific hormones from adrenal glands (glucocorticoids). In humans, the primary glucocorticoid is cortisol. These hormones prepare us for various challenges by adjusting our heart rates, energy production and brain function. Recent evidence has shown that expression labels decrease for people who have experienced childhood stress and trauma (Jaenisch and Bird, 2003). As a result, glucocorticoids cannot shut off their own production and the hormone’s continual release evokes a continuous stress response, even after the threat has subsided. Scientists have described this as a disruption of “feedback inhibition”, wherein the body’s stress thermostat has gone awry.
Another group of scientists periodically separated mothers from their young pups and exposed the mothers to stressful stimuli such as placing them in cold water or physically restraining them. The separations occurred at erratic times so as to prevent the mothers comforting their pups (F1). The male F1 mice displayed depressive behaviors and tended to be more risk seeking. Moreover, their sperm showed ectopic (i.e., abnormal) expression of microRNA’s, a form of small non-coding RNAs that can serve as epigenetic markers. One such micro RN, miR-375, is implicated in the stress response. When these sperm were injected into freshly fertilized eggs from untraumatized mothers, the results were recapitulated and the depressive behaviors were transmitted to the future generations (Gapp et al, 2014). Similar studies, including the research project I am working on currently, have tracked changes across multiple generations following induced trauma of the parental generation (Chen et al, 2016; Dias and Ressler, 2014). Taken together, there is granular evidence that suggests the stress caused by war, prejudice, poverty and other forms of childhood adversity have biological consequences in addition to the socioeconomic impacts.
The nature and extent of cross-generational psychobiological consequences of maternal trauma and stress has also been studied due to its implication of perniciousand flagranteffects on multiple generations. One general consequence of maternal stress and trauma is the compromising of secure attachments to their young. Offspring of these mothers often fail to develop and maintain durable relationships in comparison to those whose mothers had stable mental health (Suomi, 1995). In monkeys, these consequences have been observed in play patterns with peers. Young monkeys with weak maternal attachments have been reported to play less often and have less sophisticated interaction with their peers. They have also been reported to be more at risk (than otherwise) of developing impulsive, socially incompetent and typically aggressive patterns of response to seemingly neutral stimuli. This has been linked to greater HPA activation for example. The corollary is that the end up at the base of their groups/ dominance hierarchy (Higley & Suomi, 1996).
Of course, findings from animal studies are far more feasible but can seem far removed from the debilitating traumatic events in human populations. That being said, the wealth of possibility engendered through the biological manipulation of controlled variables that is uniquely possible in animal studies can further our understanding of the psychobiological effects of trauma—to the extent that generalizability is valid between the human and animal phenomena under study, such as the stress response (Harlow, Suomi & Gluck, 1972). There has also been clear cut evidence that this phenomenon transpires in humans as well, specifically in the after-effects of trauma survival harboring more fragility and vulnerability in future generations. In one provocative finding, researchers found that offspring of Holocaust survivors were more likely to developed posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) following deployment in the Lebanon war. The symptomology and psychiatric features of Holocaust survivors were identified in their children. Subdued symptoms of PTSD were also observed in children of Vietnam war veterans (Rosenheck and Nathan, 1985). This phenomenon has been referred to as secondary traumatization. In fact, using a genetic epidemiology approach, some have characterized this vulnerability using a simple equation:
VnsD= VG+Vc+VE
In this model,VnsDis the sum of the variance contributed by genetic contributions to PTSD vulnerability (VG), the common shared family environmental factors (VC) and the unique factors associated with the individual (VE). Although this is just a model, taken in context, it seems to imply that there are a host of factors that can impact our vulnerability to social environments that can, in turn, shape the development of various mental disorders (Danieli, 1997).
The salience of VC, especially, should not go understated. Different cultures manifest this human instinct to relay culture and custom in varying ways. Southeast Asian parents, for example, aim to pass on a cultural code of conduct acceptable in their communities, mostly emphasizing values such as respect and obedience. Any negative traits are blamed on the foreign communities they are a part of, depicting a wholly positive impact of cultural transmission. In Central Americans families, on the other hand, parents strive to pass on their language and customs—such as intrafamilial communication, love and respect for parents. On yet another hand, there are aspects of the culture, which are viewed as negative, that many families actively attempt to withhold from future generations—such as machismo, submissiveness and armed violence. Thus, although both cultural grips try to mitigate the transmission of trauma, they differ radically in where they feel the violence is rooted. Many Central Americans will see violence as existing in their communities and acknowledge the risk of transmission, whereas Southeast Asians may attribute the violence in their communities as originating in the outside world—only transmitted to their offspring upon breaches of the code of conduct (Danieli, 1997).
Despite the attempts to conceal or mitigate the effects of trauma on a behavioral or cultural level, TEI would suggest that many of these traumatic events will inevitably be passed on biologically. Trends observed in society, such as higher prevalence of mental health or metabolic disorders in various communities can be traced back to experiences the individuals never had and in order to break out of the vicious cycle, we presently have to harness the remnants of the past. A future avenue of research could more thoroughly inspect the relationship between negative social environments and epigenetics in order to study ways in which individuals can effectively respond to their epigenomic makeup.
Some Philosophical Implications:
Agency:
Circling back to the Orwell quote on being able to control the future by controlling the past, the prospect agency and free will are under even more scrutiny given the consequences of TEI. Philosophers and scientists make heavy weather of the concepts of free will and determinism in large part because the absence of the former qua the latter repeals moral responsibility. From the perspective of the hard determinist, all events can be explained by prior causal factor, leaving no room for freedom of will or choice. On a macroscopic level, these factors can be environmental, before diving into the microscopic level of the genes until you finally reach the entirely predictable and mathematically verifiable movement of electrons free on the quantum scale. Free will on the other hand requires that one is the originator of one’s actions. To what extent can mental health disorders undermine free will, and, further, to what extent can the epigenetic changes you inherit from your forbears impact your agency.
Not only is the question of agency and culpability in the cases of mental health disorders under scrutiny, but how are we to treat actions of those that have been marked—even indirectly dictated—by the plight of their ancestors? If agency continues to be defined as the absence of internal and external constraints on your choices—making you, the agent, the decision maker—can agency exist if we are internally constrained by TEI? These are deep philosophical questions that merit further inspection. On cursory inspection, it seems like we ought to be considering what, if anything, it means to feel like we are free. How do narratives of untouchable constraints enable or cripple our notion of feeling free? In some sense, knowledge is empowering. But regardless of whether such knowledge couldhave any qualitative bearing on, at the very minimum, how we feel regarding the decisions we take ourselves to be making every day—like, what to eat, what outfit to where and which library to study in? —there is a sense in which we might fear that having our lives constrained by untouchable, preordained factors dictated by TEI defeats the very purpose of resetting the clock and having control over your own subjective experiences. One could argue that Darwinian evolution already implied predispositions based on heritability, but TEI presents a much eerier and much more palpable sense in which we cannot escape the plight of our ancestors.
Subjective Experience:
As epigenetics concerns the changes your environment can have on your genome, and hence your subjective experiences of that environment, it follows that at least theoretically speaking, TEI would imply the inheritance of the physical markers of this subjective experience. As such, what it means to be youis indelibly marked by what it meant to be your ancestors—what it meant to experience what they experienced and feel what they felt. Consciousness, relatedly, is understood to be your subjective experience of the world viz. what it feels like to be you. As philosopher Thomas Nagel says, “phenomenal consciousness is experience; what makes a state phenomenally conscious is that there is nothing ‘it is like’(Nagel, 1974). From a TEI perspective, the scars of your ancestors can seemingly seep into your phenomenal consciousness. David Chalmers posits a similar account of subjectivity in his discourse on the enigmatic nature of consciousness. He says:
“The really hard problem of consciousness is the problem of experience. When we think and perceive, there is a whir of information-processing, but there is also a subjective aspect…. This subjective aspect is experience. When we see, for example, we experience visual sensations: the felt quality of redness, the experience of dark and light, the quality of depth in a visual field. Other experiences go with perception in different modalities: the sound of a clarinet, the smell of mothballs. Then there are bodily sensations… mental images… the felt quality of emotion…. What unites all of these states is that there is something it is like to be in them. All of them are states of experience.” (Chalmers, 1995)
This isn’t, of course, to imply that our conscious experience is therefore negligible. However, the implications of TEI, if corroborated, would serve to undermine (in some capacity) the hardness of the problem insofar as TEI claims that the subjective components of our experience are not entirely up to us. If they are to some extent constrained by physical events occurring before we are born and crystallized by epigenetic imprints, one might think that the subjectivenature of experience is neither that subjective nor that intangible after all. Perhaps it is merely a deeply mysterious, yet close to home, objective phenomena—one that, by constraining our agency acts on the what “it is like” to be as Nagel says: the qualia. In this sense, our subjective experience would only be an illusion of subjectivity on the determinist picture supported by TEI but, nonetheless, an illusion that requires explanation and such an illusion is notinsignificant in that regard.
Is it all doomed?
Are we doomed? You might think, necessarily so, by the compelling genetic imprint of our ancestor’s subjective experiences. Is there an escape to this vicious cycle? The line of reasoning outlined in the foregoing passages may tempt a very fatalistic mindset in which it feels as if your future is dictated by your ancestor’s past. Knowledge of the scientific basis of your mental state has the potential to make that mental stateseem set in stone. However, the stress your forebears underwent will inevitably and inescapably shape your stress response, whether on genetic or cultural grounds, and therefore predispose you to a lifestyle you may not have chosen, given the opportunity. That being said, a frequently unacknowledged component of this dilemma is the power of responsivity to the environment that is not as easily explained by the deterministic model, at least in the biological narrative. That is, the onus and strength is on each individual to recognize the possibility of a predisposition dictated by events they had no control over, and to respond in a constructive way that can transcend the genes (at least while philosophers and physicists continue to mull over whether we, in fact, have agency or not). After all, epigenetics means “above” or “over” genes themselves, so what is to say the environment you cultivate, also over and above epigenetics, cannot hereon after define a new equilibrium, a new homeostasis.
There is universality in multigenerational transmission of trauma as evident by the ubiquity of stressors and the phenomenologically similar repercussions of intergenerational trauma. In every culture, in every individual, there are multiple realities shaped by past events. It is true that we are still far from understanding the different effects of different types of stressors born out of different types of cultural and traumatic events, and, as a result, one must caution taking a unidimensional approach to understanding these complex phenomena. Many of our most pressing concerns, including determinism itself, have not been settled. So, surely, not everything is set in stone.
However, the prospect of TEI is one that warrants due attention in order to break out of the vicious cycle of trauma, as trauma is a plight that affects relationships throughout the totality of one’s lifetime: from birth to death, including all the developmental and transition stages. There is surely hope enshrined in future generations, but that hope can be eclipsed by not only the cultural remnants but also the biological remnants. Rather than viewing culture and its transmission as isolated from the physical, biological world, the two must be seen as intertwined with deterministic forces acting within and throughout. As culture can have widespread impacts on a whole populations (epi)genome, correction and reconciliation must be oriented at groups and communities rather than individuals. Hence, principles from sociology and anthropology can inform a wholistic understanding of our phenotypes. From this point, we can study the genetic factors of resilience and what factors are conducive to the development of resilience. It may take generations to undo the plight of oppression, but it only takes care and attention to recognize the past, claim authority over it, and in turn control what lies ahead.
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