Comment by Vera_Wilde
3 months ago
Worms are great, but they're not your grandma.
So one thing missing from the excitement around this line of work: how little these worm effects generalize to mammals.
C. elegans has very unusual biology — direct soma→germline communication pathways, minimal nervous systems, and short generational cycles. Epigenetic inheritance is much easier to observe there than in mice or humans, where mechanisms differ and dilution across meiosis tends to erase these “marks.”
This means that, even if the PA14 avoidance effect replicates, it’s not evidence that humans inherit learned behaviours. It’s evidence that worms are an interesting edge-case system.
The article is about how difficult it is to study the effect in very simple organisms, and your criticism is that it's not yet studied in much more complicated organisms. Guess we need a few more decades (or centuries)...
So what? Not everything has to be about humans.
No. Science is inherently human-centric. If a line of academic research has no conceivable way of benefitting humans, at least indirectly, it is eventually halted.