NB: this is a rambling/random thought i had about how cool it would be if X.... don't take it seriously.
Similar to memes, only the strongest genes survive. It's survival of the fittest.
We know that when we're born, our parents pass down to us their strongest genes. We're born with 23 chromosome pairs, half being inherited from our mother and the other half from our father. Which chromosomes we get from each of the 23 homologous pairs of both parents is a matter of randomness, biology, maths, and some may even say luck. There are roughly 3 billion DNA base pairs, an estimated 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes, and 8,324,608 possible combinations of our 23 chromosome pairs. The total possible combination of alleles for those pairs are 70,368,744,177,664[1].
Briefly, epigenetics concerns itself with marking specific DNA as useable or not. Research[2][3][4] has shown that our parents' experiences can be passed down to us by epigenetics, and there are studies involving understanding it for treatment of family diseases[5]. Now imagine that through some variation on epigenetics with neurological influences, we could pass down knowledge to future generations, meaning they know things that we know, without necessarily having to study or practice it. If they choose not to use it, they lose it, and can't pass it down further.
How cool would it be if we could receive selections of our parents' knowledge through genes? For example, if you come from a family of exceptional blacksmits, you're born with the knowledge they have on blacksmithing. You'd improve upon their skill, instantly, without having to spend years working at the craft. Father was a mathematician? Cool, I don't need to learn calculus or complex analysis.
On the flip side though, learning new things you're interested in, is part of the fun...
[1] - https://www2.palomar.edu/anthro/biobasis/bio_3.htm
[2] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC43430006/
[3] - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3792618/
[4] - http://science.sciencemag.org/content/339/6118/448
[5] - https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/scientists-discover-how-epigenetic-information-could-be-inherited
01/03/2019
