Word: darwins
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What's more, any such effects of nurture (environment) on a species' nature (genes) were not supposed to happen so quickly. Charles Darwin, whose On the Origin of Species celebrated its 150th anniversary in November, taught us that evolutionary changes take place over many generations and through millions of years of natural selection. But Bygren and other scientists have now amassed historical evidence suggesting that powerful environmental conditions (near death from starvation, for instance) can somehow leave an imprint on the genetic material in eggs and sperm. These genetic imprints can short-circuit evolution and pass along new traits...
...ongoing epigenetic research is that with the flick of a biochemical switch, we could tell genes that play a role in many diseases - including cancer, schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer's, diabetes and many others - to lie dormant. We could, at long last, have a trump card to play against Darwin...
...Make a Better Mouse As momentous as epigenetics sounds, the chemistry of at least one of its mechanisms is fairly simple. Darwin taught us that it takes many generations for a genome to evolve, but researchers have found that it takes only the addition of a methyl group to change an epigenome. A methyl group is a basic unit in organic chemistry: one carbon atom attached to three hydrogen atoms. When a methyl group attaches to a specific spot on a gene - a process called DNA methylation - it can change the gene's expression, turning it off or on, dampening...
...concerned that your ideas will be trumpeted by the creationist movement? Science is a big enough interest group. It can look after itself. (Read "The Ever Evolving Theories of Darwin...
...things considered, do you believe Darwin was a great luminary in the path of human progress? What has the theory of evolution done for the practical benefit of humanity? It's helped our understanding of ourselves, yet compared to, say, the discovery of penicillin or the invention of the World Wide Web, I wonder why Darwin occupies this position at the pinnacle of esteem. I can only imagine he has been put there by a vast public relations exercise...