In: Psychology
What makes epigenetics confusing or hard to understand?
Gene is a sequence in DNA strand which has information and can create or code protein.Basically these genes or part of DNA takes part to transfer traits to offspring in hereditary process.DNA has two parts - Genotype and phenotype.
Genotype is a set of gene in our DNA which is responsible for a particular trait whereas phenotype is the characteristic of that trait.For example genotype says that a human offspring will be a human having all organ as the parents but a phenotype says the offspring can be tall or short nomatters how their parent is.phenotype can change with environmental effect as well as genotype effect.
Epigentics is a process which shows changes in our genes(active/inactive) with due course of time.Epigenetic changes is regular and natural occurance but can also be affected by factors like age,environmental condition, lifestyle, your likes and dislikes, diseases etc.so its very tricky to say something about the traits, likes and dislikes,nature of 2 twins having same DNA as they might have got epigenome which was created by factors like smoking , alchohol,physical activity,diet,obesity,diseases,pollution etc to thier parents and have been created in uneven manner in the twins because way of distribution of cells out of DNA-gene is different.
so one kid is tall other is short , one has got black hair other has brown.one is fair and other is dark which may or may not resemble thier parents trait as the environmental change which happened at the time of parents might have changes the DNA factor and epigenome which took different shapes in these two kids in the form of different way of cell creation in various organs and because of it they acquired different traits.
Also epigentics and its impact is very tricky to understand and even researcher is in their early stage to find out the format of changes in offspring and the mere reason is the difficulty to understand impact of lifestyle factors on an individual epigenome and health as its difficult to run studies on humans ethical reasons.Its also very tough to get the format of changes happened in time.
One of the most interesting and controversial aspects of epigenetics is the concept of inheritance. This suggests that events in our lives can affect our children's development and health, and possibly our grandchildren's.
Similarly, experiences our parents and grandparents had before we were born may also impact on our lives.
The below diagram will show impact of Environment and complexity to understand it in epigenetics -