How is this prevented from being passed from a parent to a child? (Analogy to “Yamanaka factors (chemical signals used to allow children to be young, rather than a thirty year old mother giving birth to a thirty year old child)”.)
Transposons are aggressively suppressed in the gonads, but not in the rest of the body. It is possible that this is even the reason for the epigenetic clock, that it evolved to kill the elderly so that they wouldn’t take resources away from their less transposon-burdened offspring, as opposed to trying to live with transposons or spend the energy needed to protect the entire body from them.
How is this prevented from being passed from a parent to a child? (Analogy to “Yamanaka factors (chemical signals used to allow children to be young, rather than a thirty year old mother giving birth to a thirty year old child)”.)
Transposons are aggressively suppressed in the gonads, but not in the rest of the body. It is possible that this is even the reason for the epigenetic clock, that it evolved to kill the elderly so that they wouldn’t take resources away from their less transposon-burdened offspring, as opposed to trying to live with transposons or spend the energy needed to protect the entire body from them.