If you’re sceptical about evolution, or just curious how it could possibly work, you NEED to watch this interview!
Many of my readers reject evolutionary theory, at least as it’s usually presented – that is, Darwinian evolution through natural selection. But few of these evolution-sceptics are familiar with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theories of evolution through inheritance of acquired characteristics. According to Edward (Ted) Steele, adding Lamarckian inheritance back into our understanding of evolution, provides answers to conundrums that strict Darwinists struggle to explain.
Ted touched on Lamarckian inheritance in our previous conversation, Life, the Universe and Everything.
In this conversation, we focused in on the details of how Lamarkian inheritance shows up in living creatures, and the mechanisms that researchers have discovered by which these inheritance patterns can actually occur.
What we discussed:
- The development of evolutionary theory in the 19th century. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theories of inheritance of acquired characteristics, preceded Charles Darwin’s development of the theory of evolution by natural selection, driven by random mutation of genes. Darwin actually endorsed Lamarck’s theories, but his champions subsequently insisted that Lamarck was wrong, and that traits acquired after an individual’s birth could not be passed on to its offspring.
- Evidence for Lamarckian inheritance. Ted asserts that instinctive behaviours are evidence of Lamarckian inheritance. He also describes the immune system as “the tip of the spear of such inheritance of acquired changes. Furthermore, many animal experiments demonstrate inheritance of acquired behaviours and characteristics.
- Overlap between epigenetic programming and Lamarckian inheritance. According to Ted, epigenetic programming – that is, alteration of structure or function of offspring because of environmental circumstances experienced by the father or mother – is a form of ‘soft’ Lamarckian inheritance, while if similarly-impacted offspring inbreed or interbreed, these alterations will be locked in as ‘hard’ Lamarckian inheritance – that is, permanent alterations in the genetic code.
- Mechanisms for Lamarckian inheritance. Multiple mechanisms by which Lamarckian inheritance could occur have been discovered and characterised, including reverse transcriptase which ‘writes’ environmentally-driven changes in RNA into DNA.
- Incorporating Lamarckian inheritance mechanisms solves problems with ‘mainstream’ evolutionary theory. Not the least of these problems is the fact that random mutation occurs too slowly to explain the timeline of species development… including our own.
- What it’s like to be a heretic in the scientific field. When Ted commenced his scientific career in the 1970s, even exploring Lamarckian ideas marked one out as a heretic! Voluminous evidence for such ideas has accumulated since then, but mainstream evolutionary biology still refuses to acknowledge it.
- Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts… and what drives them (eventually), which is an accumulation of data that simply does not fit the dominant paradigm.
- The need for funding of basic research to test hypotheses of Lamarckian inheritance. And some of the obstacles to such funding!
Further reading:
‘Epigenetic–Genetic Coupling and Understanding the Molecular and Cellular Basis of Lamarckian Inheritance’ by Robyn Lindley, Reginald Gorczynski and Edward Steele.
‘The Evidence For Lamarck’ by Edward Steele.
The Case of the Midwife Toad by Arthur Koestler – free version on Archive.org.
Lamarck’s Signature: How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin’s Natural Selection Paradigm by Edward J. Steele, Robyn A. Lindley and Robert V. Blanden – free version on Archive.org, or support the authors and buy a copy.
