Into the Wormhole of Genetic Memory

Award-winning writer, journalist, and mullet whisperer Michael Rutschky redirected me to thoughts on genetic memory by way of his link to a post on The Schpat Dope, Is There Such a Thing as Genetic Memory? The following passage, in particular, got my mental gears grinding:

Their findings: rats that had been fed the livers and brains of rats that had been stressed learnt to avoid pain more quickly. This they found out was due to chemicals produced by the stressed rats, the higher the stress the higher the levels of these chemicals and the quicker the learning rate.

Does this qualify as proof that eating animals that died in fear passes that fear on to the eater? Does this mean that after countless generations of eating scared, stressed animals has led humanity to be more fearful and stressed? If so, why aren't meat eating wild animals like lions and tigers and bears (Oh my!) full of fear and stress? Are prey animals taken down in the wild less full of fear and stress than domestic livestock? Are lab rats rolled around in sealed jars more full of fear and stress than domestic livestock and free-roaming wildebeests? Are lab rats fed a diet of chopped up lab rats that were rolled around in sealed jars more likely to inherit the fear and stress of their tortured predecessors than humans fed a diet of chopped up chickens that were kept in wire cages? Are the stress and fear of tortured lab rats more "contagious" than, say, the stress and fear of a capybara killed by having its windpipe crushed by a jaguar?



And how could any of that be proved?

I believe that eating severely stressed animals is worse for you than eating animals that were happy right before we slit their throats or bashed their heads in or shot them with a Muzzy MX-3 100 Grain 3-Blade broadhead.

Apoptosis: Pulse of Life

Life's many layers blow my mind.

The interweaving of seemingly disparate wormholes and mindthreads from across the blanket of reality and even from beyond the fabric itself, seeing how it all connects...beginning to see how it all connects, sometimes visibly and sometimes you can just feel it.

Life and death. Good and evil. How beautiful is the above entity? Is it odd that we instinctively know we're looking at a manifestation of life? That's prostate cancer, my friends. Real bad shit. [snicker] Odd how something so deadly can be beautiful. Guess it isn't, though. A great many beautiful things will kill you. Death itself is a thing of beauty. Death is a polytentacled energy vector. Death is simply energy transfer and movement on the atomic level.

Mitochondriate eukaryotic cells live poised between life and death, because mitochondria still retain their repertoire of molecules which can trigger cell suicide.[16] This process has now been evolved to happen only when programmed. Given certain signals to cells (such as feedback from neighbors, stress or DNA-damage), mitochondria release caspase activators which trigger the cell-death inducing biochemical cascade. As such, the cell-suicide mechanism is now crucial to all of our lives.

Cell-suicide mechanism? That'd be a good band name. Biochemical Cascade. Bad-ass.

Programmed cell death. Some cells are designed to die in specified situations. Their deaths benefit us.

Beautiful. We live and we die every day in a million different ways, the pulse of life.