This is part of what Eva Jablonka talks about as "soft inheritance" http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1415...
These sorts of discoveries really push towards a re-evaluation of Lamarck's thought, frankly.
These sorts of discoveries really push towards a re-evaluation of Lamarck's thought, frankly.
Ultimately, we could interpret this mechanism as a trans-generational evolutionary defense against stresses (for instance, famines). But those mechanisms would themselves have evolved through the process of natural selection, and these "sperm influencing" cells would themselves be coded in our DNA.
That is to say, introducing a new kind of stress or environmental factor would not trigger any of these cells and would have no effect.
Correct me if I'm wrong but that's how I understood the paper.
I think if you disqualify the changes DNA _enables_ (rather than directly encodes) then you've moved the goalposts a little.
No, but the ability to learn languages is in our DNA
> I think if you disqualify the changes DNA _enables_
What our DNA enables is the ability to learn a language, not the language itself.
I mean I guess that is a possibility, but that would be incredibly generic wouldn't it? That a cell could somehow identify novel environmental factors and figure out what gene expressions to enhance/neutralize in the next generation to adapt to that novel environmental factor? Strains credulity.
Lots of animals starved, since there were animals, and the ability to tune the behavior on a time-scale of a few generations might have been valuable, so it might have evolved. The basics of our hormonal system have not changed much since very simple animals, I think.
They fundamentally don’t. Lamarckism was an explanatory model for evolution, and even if these results turn out to be true, they are not evolution. They are transient changes, whereas genetic changes are permanent. You need permanence for adaptation. Lamarckism fundamentally cannot explain the acquisition of new traits, only the (relatively short-term) modulation of existing ones. A good explanation of the difference, and why Lamarckism definitely failed as an explanatory model for evolution, can be found in Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker.
Jablonka’s hypothesis is widely regarded as falsified (e.g. http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2012/05...).
Now we are seeing that there exist things which only MAY be repeatable experiments but reaching consensus falls outside of that particular method.
I think eventually we'll find a gradient of reality where natural selection isn't the end all be all, just as much as spontaneous creation wasn't either. Learned behaviors being inheritable genetically being just the tip of the iceberg. Heresy now, but I can see where this goes.