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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

I see you being downvoted, but it's a good quip.

Lamarckian vs. Mendelian genetics was about heritable traits being acquired in life (Lamarck), or being discrete units passed down at conception (Mendel).

Genetics is almost entirely Mendelian, but some of epigenetics is durable and thus Lamarckian.

There's also retroviral integrations, transposons, and all sorts of other complexities that don't fit neatly into boxes.

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Interesting about the epigenetics, transposons, and other DNA augmentations…

These are all fundamentally a story of how the individual encounters and uses information in their lived experience. But there is also a very strong consensus narrative that must be respected, but also challenged and evolved. DNA is literally the informational substrate of a life… when you adopt a personal belief, or are subject to someone elses, you have the ability to help but also harm your informational substrate. Tend your garden of ideas with love and care.

The dirty little secret is that there is an incredible ideological incentive for many for Lamarckianism to be true so that they can blame “lived experience” for every ill in the world. Retroviruses, transposons, etc do not have that specific property and thus you see far fewer articles extolling their purported impacts.

Not just epigenetics, cells (and probably organisms) have mechanisms to induce mutations at elevated rates (e.g. E. Coli lacZ mutation under pressure). I wouldn't be surprised if nervous systems are elegantly wired to both epigentic and mutagenic levers to accelerate evolution through stimulus guided modifications rather than just raw survival/selection.

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