But Darwinism, the ultimate in scienceyness, gets a pass? Legal enforcement?
From The Guardian:
Lots of real scientific terms – such as “neuro” or “nano” – get borrowed for a spot of buzzword scienceyness. Epigenetics is a real and important part of biology, but due to predictable quackery, it is threatening to become the new quantum.
All of your cells contain all of your 22,000 genes, but not all of them need to be active all the time. They need to be turned on or off, in the right tissue, at the right moment, and so we have incredible networks of control systems in our genomes – circuits, programmes, hierarchies. Epigenetics literally means “in addition to genetics” and is one such system – modifications to DNA without altering the gene sequence itself. Think of DNA as an orchestral score, the notes on the page unchanging. But the annotations on the manuscript will dictate how the music sounds, with crescendo and lento and adagio. The conductor and orchestra play their annotated manuscript, and each performance is unique, even when the original scores are identical.
Many individual genes are modulated, or tagged, like this too, and many corresponding traits are dependent on this system. We’ve known about this for decades. Rat mothers lick their pups, and those that are licked less have measurably higher stress levels, which correlates with less epigenetic tagging on genes associated with stress. What’s more, it’s reversible. So, the environment influences genetics. More.
Rutherford goes on to front Darwinism. But he has already said all we need to know in that case.
Too bad if Adam Rutherford has to do that to stay in print; worse if he believes it.
Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose
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