Item — HN Reader

Not to speak well of air pollution, but the article seems far too eager to implicate it in reducing male fertility.

Alternate theory: The pollution-induced epigenetic changes are mostly to adapt any offspring to living in an environment with more-polluted air. Given how often our ancestors used indoor air pollution (from cooking fires and such) to discourage disease-spreading insects, that would be a very reasonable adaption.

1 comments

Yep, exactly the sort of thing I was alluding to.

The "DNA is a Turing computer and everyone is born a blank slate" model is a bit too intellectually convenient for a 20th century that gave us egalitarianism and Turing computers.

It's mostly true, but not entirely, and the few percent that doesn't fit that model is enough to matter, and perhaps explains some persistent social phenomena which don't fit the picture.