Word: environmentalism
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...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 in a single generation. (See TIME's photo-essay on Charles Darwin...
...decades of experiments with rats, for instance, neuroscientist Michael Meaney at McGill University in Canada and his colleagues have shown how such environmentally induced traits can be passed down - then undone, also by environment. Meaney studied rats with differing maternal styles - some were naturally nurturing (they licked and groomed their pups constantly), others were less attentive and even neglectful (mother rats placed in stressful environments like isolation had greatly decreased capacity for nurture). What researchers found was that these behavioral traits were passed down to future generations: pups born to neglectful mothers endured stressful childhoods and grew up to become...
The psychological effects often exacerbate health problems that the physiological stress response has already caused. High ACE scorers who do not overeat, smoke or take drugs still have high rates of obesity, heart disease, depression and diabetes. The mechanism for these risks appears to lie in the biology of the...
For most of human evolution, a stressful world would have been marked by famines or periods of starvation, and that environment might have resulted in a particular pattern of gene expression that would have prompted the body to store more fat in preparation for the next bout of scarcity. Today...
"Early adverse experience can disrupt the body's metabolic systems," says Shonkoff. "One of the cornerstones of biology is that our body's systems when they are young are reading the environment and establishing patterns to be maximally adaptive."