When I first encountered epigenetic research, some 10 years ago, (where epigenetics is the modification of the genome by environmental factors) I remember the thrill of seeing Darwinism being disproven, well, the Neo-Darwinist Theory (NDT) synthesis anyway. Darwin himself had this archaic idea of “gemmules” carrying traits from the body to the gametes, but Mendel blew all that nonsense out of the water. Not until 50 years after Darwin’s death did his theory get resurrected with the discrete gene as the bearer of the all-important genetic blueprint. This led to the central dogma of NDT, that genes are the DNA blueprints for the cell, producing the RNA transcriptions that get converted into the proteins that make up a cell, a dogma where all the information flows in one direction. We were told that genes are impervious to their environment, being only mixed-and-matched during sex, though in an exact Mendelian fashion manipulated only through natural selection, which really should have been called selective extermination. This automation of inheritance into depersonalized gene sequences gave rise to a host of 20th century efforts to harness the power of the gene machine: eugenics, sterilization, Social Darwinism, genocide, sperm banks, and even war.
In this elevation of natural selection as the only motor that drove evolution, there had to be a corresponding battle against every other motor of change, such as Lamarckian environmental inheritance. Thus every biology textbook trashed Lamarck, despite the great similarity between his views and Darwin’s. He was worse than wrong, he was an apostate heretic.
Now pause a moment, and ask why natural selection had to be so exclusivist. Why couldn’t there be multiple ways to improve a species, why should every other method be invalid?