Lamarck! Lamarck! Come back! All is forgiven. It's NOT all in our selfish genes!

According to Emily Singer at Technology Review, we are looking at "A Comeback for Lamarckian Evolution?: Two new studies show that the effects of a mother's early environment can be passed on to the next generation." (February 04, 2009):

The effects of an animal's environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring, according to two new studies. If applicable to humans, the research, done on rodents, suggests that the impact of both childhood education and early abuse could span generations. The findings provide support for a 200-year-old theory of evolution that has been largely dismissed: Lamarckian evolution, which states that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring.

"The results are extremely surprising and unexpected," says Li-Huei Tsai, a neuroscientist at MIT who was not involved in the research. Indeed, one of the studies found that a boost in the brain's ability to rewire itself and a corresponding improvement in memory could be passed on. "This study is probably the first study to show there are transgenerational effects not only on behavior but on brain plasticity."

Basically, the living conditions of mice and rats affected the apparent genetic inheritance of their offspring. Mice genetically engineered to have memory problems not only improved when their environment was enriched, but passed the improvement on to their offspring.

In the opposite direction, rats raised by stressed, abusive mothers showed modifications to their DNA, and grew up to be poor mothers. That might just be learned experience, of course, but

In the new study, researchers also had healthy mothers raise the offspring of stressed mothers, and found that the problems were only partially fixed. That suggests that the changes "were not due to their neonatal experience," says David Sweatt, a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who oversaw the study. "It was something that was already there when they were born." The research was published online last month in Biological Psychiatry.

The results of both studies are likely to be controversial, perhaps resurrecting a centuries-old debate. "It's very provocative," says Lisa Monteggia, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, in Dallas. "It goes back to two schools of thought: Lamarck versus Darwin."

Here's an interesting observation from Singer's article:

"If the findings can be conveyed to human, it means that girls' education is important not just to their generation but to the next one," says Moshe Szyf of McGill University, in Montreal, who was not involved in the research.

Well, cultures that don't believe in educating girls do correlate highly with a low quality of life ...

Considering the ridicule heaped by Darwinists on Lamarckian theory over the years, this is just another example of why Darwin's theory is in trouble in what is supposed to be its hour of big triumph. In reality, it is mainly a triumph in the pop media and out-of-touch religious denominations and museums.

See also this article by Sharon Begley, co-author of The Mind and the Brain.

Remember - one gene codes for one protein? Also. you ARE your genes? And all that? Uh ...

Darwin's odd musings on circumcision. Believe whatever you like. He certainly did.

Darwinism and popular culture: Newsweek columnist fronts anti-Darwin inheritance theory

No one in recent memory has ever questioned Darwinism and got away without attacks by hordes of Darwinbots.

Remember that when you read Sharon Begley's "The Sins of the Fathers, Take 2 At tributes to Darwin, Lamarckism—inheritance of acquired traits—will be the skunk at the party" (Newsweek, Jan 17, 2009):

Some water fleas sport a spiny helmet that deters predators; others, with identical DNA sequences, have bare heads. What differs between the two is not their genes but their mothers' experiences. If mom had a run-in with predators, her offspring have helmets, an effect one wag called "bite the mother, fight the daughter." If mom lived her life unthreatened, her offspring have no helmets. Same DNA, different traits. Somehow, the experience of the mother, not only her DNA sequences, has been transmitted to her offspring.

I keep wondering why Darwin's heirs decided to hold a big blowout at exactly the point when we had ever more reasons to doubt. (But religious fanatics never think of things like that, do they?)

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Remember - one gene codes for one protein? Also. you ARE your genes? And all that?

Good. Now exercise your brain by forgetting all that.

Here Emma Young at New Scientist (09 July 2008) brings us up to date with a more plausible story:

No one is arguing that Lamarck got everything right, but over the past decade it has become increasingly clear that environmental factors, such as diet or stress, can have biological consequences that are transmitted to offspring without a single change to gene sequences taking place. In fact, some biologists are already starting to consider this process as routine. However, fully accepting the idea, provocatively dubbed the "new Lamarckism", would mean a radical rewrite of modern evolutionary theory. Not surprisingly, there are some who see that as heresy. "It means the demise of the selfish-gene theory," says Eva Jablonka at Tel Aviv University, Israel. "The whole discourse about heredity and evolution will change" (see " Rewriting Darwin and Dawkins?").

The demise of selfish gene theory is long overdue, of course.

I am a bit queasy about at least one aspect of this New Scientist article: An attempt to blame modern obesity rates on ancestral diets. Modern obesity is mainly due to lack of exercise. If the most exercise you ever get is moving the cursor around, you have one impressive index finger, second joint upward, but ... that's like about .2 percent of fitness.


Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

Darwin's odd musings on circumcision: Believe whatever you like ... he certainly did

Friend Malcolm Chisholm, who is "finding that the Darwin we have been taught about is not the same as Darwin in his own words" has been reading Darwin's odd musings on circumcision, from the second edition (1875) of Darwin's The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, which he is "wading through." Of this book, he notes,

It was first published in 1868, but the second edition has the chapter on Pangenesis largely rewritten. Since Darwin died in 1882, this is pretty much as close as we get to the synthesis of his life of thought and final positions.

And what were these? Well, certainly not what the Darwin cult will tell you ...

First, he found, Darwin confirms himself as definitely Lamarckian. That is,

He absolutely believes that if a part of the body falls into disuse - or is removed - an inherited effect will reduce the appearance of this part of the body in subsequent generations. The mechanism he proposes for this is "Pangenesis" whereby every bit of the organism is responsible for getting itself inherited into the next generation.

He sees this being achieved via "gemmules" - units of inheritance that each cell (or maybe part of the body) passes on to succeeding generations, where they cause the same character to be expressed. If a bit of the body is removed, it cannot send its signal via the gemmules to the next generation, and so disappears. If a bit of the body falls into disuse, it produces fewer gemmules, so is less well expressed in succeeding generations.

Now, why does this matter? Because the Darwin fanatics attribute magical powers to natural selection (survival of the fittest) to produce major changes - and typically denounce Lamarckism (inheritance of acquired characteristics).

Now, Lamarck (the early French biologist who gave his name to Lamarckism) and Darwin might be right about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Generations of environmentalists have worried that they are - that eggs and sperm may be damaged by environmental effects, for example, thus introducing acquired characteristics to inheritance. But Lamarckism is nonetheless Bad Thought, Wrong Thought, as you doubtless learned from your Darwinist biology texts.

From what Chisholm has discovered, Darwin himself wouldn't have agreed with those texts. But with the Founder safely dead, the cult carries on regardless.

Which brings us to circumcision. Darwin had given careful thought to the practice, often a religious obligation, and in that case usually performed in early infancy.

Chisholm writes,

If the foreskin is removed, according to Darwin's Lamarckian view, it should be reduced or missing in descendents. No foreskin means it cannot pass on its gemmules. The problem is that foreskins are still with us.

Let's review how Darwin tackles this difficult problem.

(a) He craftily dismisses Mohammedan circumcision in an indirect manner as being practiced "at a later age than the Jews".

But, trying to have it both ways, he notes that Dr. Riedel, Assistant Resident in the North Celebes, "writes to me that the boys there go naked until from six to ten years old; and he has observed that many of them, though not all, have their prepuces (foreskin, removed at circumcision) much reduced in length, and this he attributes to the inherited effects of the operation".

In some Muslim traditions, circumcision is performed in infancy, but in others around seven (traditionally, the "age of reason") and in still others, at puberty. Chisholm notes that there is "quite a bit of sophistry in this writing, allowing Darwin a lot of wiggle room while apparently building his case" - which becomes very difficult when he addresses the Jews because Jewish circumcision is performed on the eighth day.

(b) The situation of the Jews is a lot more difficult for Darwin. He recognizes this as follows: "With respect to Jews, I have been assured by three medical men of the Jewish faith that circumcision, which has been practised for so many ages, has produced no inherited effect."

Even so, Darwin is still able to find empirical evidence for his view: "Blumenbach, however, asserts (12/57. 'Philosoph. Mag.' volume 4 1799 page 5.) that Jews are often born in Germany in a condition rendering circumcision difficult, so that a name is given them signifying "born circumcised;" and Professor Preyer informs me that this is the case in Bonn, such children being considered the special favourites of Jehovah."

Darwin continues: "I have also heard from Dr. A. Newman, of Guy's Hospital, of the grandson of a circumcised Jew, the father not having been circumcised, in a similar condition. But it is possible that all these cases may be accidental coincidence, for Sir J. Paget has seen five sons of a lady and one son of her sister with adherent prepuces; and one of these boys was affected in a manner "which might be considered like that commonly produced by circumcision;" yet there was no suspicion of Jewish blood in the family of these two sisters."

Unconvinced? I gather that Chisholm was too, for he writes,

(c) Just in case the reader is still baffled by all of this, Darwin immediately disposes of any uncertainty by stating at the beginning of the next paragraph: "Notwithstanding the above several negative cases, we now possess conclusive evidence that the effects of operations are sometimes inherited."

Do we?

(d) Later on, Darwin is forced to return to the problem as he expounds on the gemmules:

"But it appears at first sight a fatal objection to our hypothesis that a part or organ may be removed during several successive generations, and if the operation be not followed by disease, the lost part reappears in the offspring."

A few lines later: "Circumcision has been practised by the Jews from a remote period, and in most cases the effects of the operation are not visible in the offspring; though some maintain that an inherited effect does occasionally appear."

Immediately following this he says: "If inheritance depends on the presence of disseminated gemmules derived from all the units of the body, why does not the amputation or mutilation of a part, especially if effected on both sexes, invariably affect the offspring? The answer in accordance with our hypothesis probably is that gemmules multiply and are transmitted during a long series of generations--as we see in the reappearance of zebrine stripes on the horse-in the reappearance of muscles and other structures in man which are proper to his lowly organised progenitors, and in many other such cases. Therefore the long-continued inheritance of a part which has been removed during many generations is no real anomaly, for gemmules formerly derived from the part are multiplied and transmitted from generation to generation."

Hence the continued appearance of foreskins actually supports Darwin's Lamarckianism based on Pangenesis implemented through gemmules.

In other words, based on almost no serious evidence, Darwin insisted on a Lamarckian interpretation of circumcision (why?) And insisted on having both ways. If the evidence didn't support him, it really did.

And this is the Great Prophet of evolution?

Chisholm adds,

This stuff is very significant. "The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication" was intended by Darwin to show how evolution works in detail and provide evidence for it. What is does show is that Darwin had views very different from those attributed to him today, but it was these views that created the foundation - at least in Darwin's mind - for the Theory of Evolution.

Maybe in Darwin's mind. But when Richard Dawkins reverently whispers that "whispers that Darwin's Origin of Species is "not just the most precious book in my library, but the most precious book in the library of our species," he does not have in mind a real book. The real book, Origin of Species, like Variation, which Chisholm has been reading, is just an old book about a theory about how species originate that is now slowly being disconfirmed for most of the cases cited.

The book that materialist atheists like Dawkins read and adore is not an earthly book, it is a heavenly book - the creation story that shows how they slowly ascended from gibbering apes to gullible devotees.

Oh and, by the way, here's one of Richard Dawkins's "Four Horsemen" of atheism, Christopher Hitchens, carrying on against circumcision. Hat tip to Mariano at Life and Doctrinaire Atheism blog.

Lamarckism making a comeback?: Otherwise, what to make of this?

In "The Evolution of Evolution, a "a review by Oren Harman of Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life by Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, we read,

In the end, a broader view of heredity might help to solve age-old perplexities, such as the origin of novel structures like the wings of birds or the flippers of once-terrestrial whales. Even more dramatically, it may provide a much firmer basis for the appearance during evolution of what the imagination-challenged proponents of intelligent design nonsensically refer to as examples of "irreducible complexity," such as the eye, the brain, or the kidney. Darwin, with Lamarck, may have failed in trying to describe a system of heredity, but he grasped a basic truth, or the second, "softer" meaning of Lamarckism: that the fit between an organism and its environment is much tighter and more intimate than would be expected if natural selection always acted on totally random variation. Explaining nature's perfection would be very difficult indeed if there existed no mechanisms to allow somehow for the transmission and the assimilation of acquired information, even if this information is not strictly genetic.

While Jablonka and Lamb have provided a cogent and impressive theoretical basis for such an argument, there is still much experimental work to be done. In the midst of the present controversies about evolutionism and creationism, this scientific path is a better one to follow, I think, than the re-iteration of an outdated neo-Darwinian theory or the defensive admission that Darwin was a religious pluralist (he was--so what?) and really a teleological theist (which he most assuredly was not). Intelligent design is an important political issue, but scientifically and intellectually it is a hollow subject. The truly interesting reflection is taking place not in some real or imagined Bible Belt or in the backwaters of a needlessly dogmatic neo-Darwinian establishment, but right under our noses, in the fascinating new insights springing from the scientific realm of evolutionary theory itself.

Ignoring the obligatory slam at ID, the article admits that neo-Darwinism is just not producing the goods, and perhaps the poor, much-ridiculed Lamarck was right, that some acquired characteristics are inherited. The article as a whole (for which you need a password) shows the usual obsequiousness toward Darwin. He can never be just plain wrong, as Einstein sometimes was.