Lamarck's Revenge
How Epigenetics Is Revolutionizing Our Understanding of Evolution's Past and Present
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
A riveting explanation of epigenetics, offering startling insights into our inheritable traits.
In the 1700s, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first described epigenetics to explain the inheritance of acquired characteristics; however, his theory was supplanted in the 1800s by Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection through heritable genetic mutations. But natural selection could not adequately explain how rapidly species re-diversified and repopulated after mass extinctions. Now advances in the study of DNA and RNA have resurrected epigenetics, which can create radical physical and physiological changes in subsequent generations by the simple addition of a single small molecule, thus passing along a propensity for molecules to attach in the same places in the next generation.
Epigenetics is a complex process, but paleontologist and astrobiologist Peter Ward breaks it down for general readers, using the epigenetic paradigm to reexamine how the history of our species-from deep time to the outbreak of the Black Plague and into the present-has left its mark on our physiology, behavior, and intelligence. Most alarming are chapters about epigenetic changes we are undergoing now triggered by toxins, environmental pollutants, famine, poor nutrition, and overexposure to violence.
Lamarck's Revenge is an eye-opening and provocative exploration of how traits are inherited, and how outside influences drive what we pass along to our progeny.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The main question posed by this frustrating book is whether the acquired characteristics of one generation can be reliably passed on to future generations. In other words, was 18th-century naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in fact correct that parents can pass on physical changes they've undergone over their lifetime for instance, improved musculature to their children, despite this theory having long been considered disproven by Darwin? Ward (Gorgon), a paleontologist and astrobiologist, defines epigenetics as "the study of heritable gene functions that are passed on from one reproducing cell to another, a somatic (body) cell or a germ cell (sperm or ovum), which do not involve a change to the original DNA sequence," while also cautioning that the actual process is "still poorly understood." Ward's analysis ranges widely, taking in the origin of life on Earth, patterns of recovery from mass extinctions, the possible genetic basis for violence, and the genetic impact of various pandemics. Ward references the classic study showing how starvation impacted one and perhaps two generations in the Netherlands following a WWII-era famine, but provides little hard evidence beyond that example. Without a proposed mechanism for such long-lasting effects and without data indicating such effects exist, Ward leaves readers with little more than suppositions.
