Epigenetics: How Our Experiences Affect Our Offspring

The Week Magazine ^ | 1-20-2013 | The Week Staff

[Kenny Bunk]

This article may be more about Lysenko than Lamarck.

It sounds suspiciously like the Official Science of the Soviet Union of the 20s and 30s.

[massmike]

Epigenetics: An evaluation of the effects of epigenetics on homosexuality.

http://www.mygenes.co.nz/epigenetics.htm

[colorado tanker]

Typical misrepresentation of Lamarck. He said that acquired characteristics came in response to necessary adaptation, not in response to random mutilation.

Lamarck was much more right than Darwin on this point, IMHO.

My high school biology text, which essentially taught that modern science knew everything there was to know about the subject, actually had a graphic ridiculing Lamarck in comparison to Darwin just to prove how much smarter modern science is. Of course, when I was in high school people still thought Silent Spring was something other than junk science.

[SunkenCiv]

Lamarck’s idea (which like Darwin’s antedated discovery of chromosomes, genes, DNA) was that creatures’ characteristics change due to interaction with the environment, and are then passed to the offspring. That’s not a “typical misrepresentation of Lamarck”, that’s exactly his view.

It’s interesting that the “what the definition of is is” semantic techniques often come into play when the “selection pressure” model within modern Darwinism (and it’s in the original, when Darwin talks about how a species of bear might start living in the sea, and generation by generation become marine and grow into “something as monstrous as a whale”) is used to “explain” something. Natural selection can, at best, lead to extinction.

The way Darwinism is synopsized now is, mutations arise at random, most of which are neutral, some of which are fatal, but a few of which give an advantage to those which have it. The fact is, evolution is really just ‘mutations arise at random’. That’s it. There is literally no role for “natural selection”.