A survey article in Nature discusses the growth of interest in epigenetics (non-Darwinian inheritance of traits), noting that one barrier to its acceptance is that we don’t know how the mechanism actually works:
Male rats fed a high-fat diet, for example, beget daughters with abnormal DNA methylation in the pancreas. Male mice fed a low-protein diet have offspring with altered liver expression of cholesterol genes3. And male mice with pre-diabetes have abnormal sperm methylation, and pass on an increased risk of diabetes to the next two generations.
“We and many other people have now shown these paternal effects,” says Rando, who led the low-protein study. “And we’re all having a hell of a time figuring out how they work.”
Some teams hope to be getting closer. In one study on inherited fear in mice,
Dias and Ressler do not claim to understand exactly what is going on, but they do have a working hypothesis. Somehow, the information about the frightening smell gets into a mouse’s testes and results in lower methylation of the Olfr151 gene in sperm DNA. The researchers even ran experiments using in vitro fertilization to make sure that the father was not in some way passing on a fear of acetophenone through interactions with the mother. The epigenetic tweak in the sperm is perpetuated in the offspring’s DNA, leading to increased expression of the receptor in the animals’ noses and, ultimately, enhanced sensitivity to the smell.
But much more work remains. What’s really significant is, “Although many are scratching their heads over the holes in the proposed mechanism, few are suggesting that the underlying phenomenon is a fairy tale.”
Lamarck was right, apparently, but he didn’t have a pressure group behind him.
See also: Epigenetics: Possible reason Mice are so timorous
Epigenetics: A look at a pioneer and his field
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Its not impossible a bad smell can get into the memory and this trigger the body system. Remember no people have ever smelled anything. We only use our memory which has done the smelling. Thats why people and animals have great memories of smells even not smelled for years. Are souls have no contact with the world through our senses. only through our memory of the senses.
Anyways its important if traits are being passed on by new acquired traits by the parents. surely this is not welcome to evolutionism and its mecghanism suggest more mechanisms are hiding in biology.
I have a strong suspicion that the biggest obstacle to the widespread acceptance of epigenetics is that it compromises core Darwinian claims. Namely epigentics directly challenges the central dogma of the modern synthesis which undergirds neo-Darwinian thought:
What is even more troubling for neo-Darwinists is, not only are transgenerational changes inherited apart from DNA (as troubling as that is for the central dogma),,,
,,,What is even more troubling for neo-Darwinists is that transgenerational changes can be environmentally induced all the way down to directly modifying the DNA of a genome,,
These findings are a direct contradiction of the modern synthesis (central dogma) of neo-Darwinism,,
But the most exciting finding from epigenetics is that ‘mental states’ are now found to have a pronounced effect on gene expression:
This finding is in direct contradiction to the materialistic assumption that we are merely helpless ‘victims of our genes’, victims who are forever trapped in whatever misfortune our genes happen to throw at us.
Of related note:
Verse and Music: