Genetic determinism

Genetic determinism says genes fix traits and major diseases in a hard one-way path. DNA writes the program. Environment only reads it.

Heredity is real. Rigid destiny for cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and behavior is false. Stress, food, hormones, and experience change gene activity, protein folding, and how traits pass across generations.

Recent work in several areas of biology is showing that heredity is not rigidly deterministic, in the way implied by traditional genetics, and it is opening the way for the development of therapies for incurable, chronic, or congenital problems, in natural and holistic ways that don't involve the mechanistic interventions of "gene therapy" or "genetic engineering."

— Ray Peat

Central Dogma and disease talk

Molecular genetics once ordered a one-way flow: DNA to RNA to protein, never back. The target was Lamarck (inheritance of acquired traits). Weismann had already cut mouse tails for generations to attack that idea.

The Central Dogma of the molecular geneticists, in their own words, was that information flows only from DNA to RNA, and from RNA to protein, never in the other direction. The Central Dogma was formulated to suppress forever the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, that Weismann's amputation of the tails of a multitude of mice had attempted to deal with earlier in the history of genetics.

— Ray Peat

The dogma still guides medicine after revisions. Putting genes into bacteria can make industrial proteins. Useful or harmful depends on the product. Bovine growth hormone harms cows and people when technology outruns biology.

About 2% of human disease involves inheritance of an abnormal protein. Even there the path from protein to illness is messy. Cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, depression get blamed on "genes" while the real physiology stays murky.

Although evidence suggests that about 2% of human diseases involve the inheritance of an abnormal protein, the exact way the disease develops is never as clear as the geneticists would imply. And the major diseases, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, epilepsy, depression, etc., that are so often blamed on "genes," are so poorly understood that it is arbitrary and crazy to talk about the way genes "cause" them.

— Ray Peat

Independent geneticists have reached a similar number from the opposite direction. A 2019 University of Alberta meta-analysis tested how well genome-wide association study (GWAS) markers actually predict disease, pooling two decades of published gene-disease data. Senior author David Wishart summarized it plainly: "the vast majority of diseases, including many cancers, diabetes, and Alzheimer's disease, have a genetic contribution of 5 to 10 percent at best," against roughly 40 to 50 percent for a handful of more strongly genetic conditions like Crohn's disease, celiac disease, and macular degeneration. "Simply put, DNA is not your destiny, and SNPs are duds for disease prediction," Wishart said; the study argues that metabolite, microbiome, and protein measures predict disease risk far better than genotype does.

A catalog of "Mendelian inheritance in man" looks rigorous and still turns every illness into a gene name. "Genetic" then means incurable until a drug for the gene product appears. Clear mutations exist (some forms of dwarfism). Environment still shapes how and when the change appears.

Stress, folding, ideology

Stress and excess estrogen activate heat-shock proteins. Viral genes turn on. Ordinary gene activity shifts. Enzymes cut DNA. The genome is living tissue under load.

Early nutrition and the womb set lifelong metabolism. The old "thrifty gene" for obesity and diabetes never produced a gene. Gestational thrift under starvation fits better. Bacteria acquire antibiotic resistance and pass it on, including sideways to other bacteria.

Huntington's and Parkinson's get sold as pure genetics. Age of onset, tissue context, and chemistry still matter. Long polyunsaturated fragments (from DHA for example) push toxic protein misfolding. Saturated fats block some of that misfolding in experiments. Brain PUFA rise with age.

Genetic control of behavior has a political record. Konrad Lorenz built gene-to-behavior ideas for racial hygiene. American eugenics journals and sterilization programs modeled later regimes. Calling a trait "genetic" shut down talk about food, toxins, class, and care. Darwin was messier than school neo-Darwinism. Regeneration and cloning show cells keep whole-organism information when the field allows expression. Tumor cells normalize in a healthy embryo field.

Practice

Refuse "it's genetic" as the end of talk on major chronic disease. Protect energy metabolism. Cut chronic stress and estrogen dominance. Cut polyunsaturated overload. Prefer whole-body support over gene-edit fantasy when the physiology is still unmapped. Regeneration is normal organism work. Culture suppressed that research line for decades.

See PUFA, Free fatty acids, Tissue leakiness, Soviet medicine.

See also

• Stress
• Estrogen
• CO2
• PUFA
• Soviet medicine
• Library:Genes, Carbon Dioxide and Adaptation
• Library:Estrogen, memory and heredity: Imprinting and the stress response