uncommondenominator wrote:
Friendly reminder that there's a difference between "genetic" and "hereditary".
Hereditary means passed from ancestors to descendants via genes.
Genetic primarily means relating to genes, but does not inherently imply heredity.
While all inherited traits are genetic, not all genetic traits are inherited.
Genetic anomalies can and do occur, without it being a hereditary occurrence.
If you have autism, and so do a lot of other members of the family, it's probably inherited. However, if you have autism, and nobody else in your family has ever had it, for generations back, it's still genetic, since it's cos of how your genes turned out, but not necessarily hereditary, since it may not be from your ancestors genes, but rather from non hereditary factors messing with your genes.
Well...you can be a first generation 'mutant'. A gene got zapped when you were conceived so you get a genetic condition from the mutant gene ...that you did not get from anyone, but you could pass it on to your offspring.
Or more likely...with a condition like autism...there could be a dozen genes involved, and no one before you had the right combination of genes to get the condition until you got it, but you still inherited those genes from your parents and grandparents etc.
The later seems to be the case with me. Individual males on both sides of the family seem to have mildly aspie traits but no one but me seems to be full blown aspie. But aspergers and even autism have only been medically recognized for a couple of generations so its not even certain there could not have been relative who would be diagnosed on the spectrum fifty or a 100 years ago.
12 Aug 2023, 12:58 am
