Carl Mosk's Economics Site

Since I started this website, I’ve written many posts on epigenetics, a term that now refers to modification of the nucleotide base composition of DNA by the environment or by other genes. Such modification—usually involving attachment of methyl groups to two of the four bases that make up DNA—may have significant effects on the organism, ranging from changed behavior to changed appearance. But “epigenetics” has been taken up by the “Darwin-was-wrong” crowd as a way to claim that environmentally induced epigenetic modifications of the DNA can be inherited in a stable fashion over generations and even produce adaptations—a decidedly non-Darwinian mode of evolution called “Lamarckian inheritance.”

You can read my previous posts, grouped under the link above, for my skeptical views on this alternative route to the evolution of adaptations. There’s no doubt that epigenetic modification of DNA can be produced by “instructions” from other parts of the DNA, and that those genetically-based modifications can be adaptive…