Discuss: Ecological Inheritance

Do I understand from this that natural selection’s explanation may have to be enlarged to include additional triggers carrying environmentally influenced methyl groups and histone proteins through the DNA/RNA reticulation process?  As well as modifications made during cell regeneration that are environmentally triggered?  I really love this complexity and discovery process accelerating so rapidly in my lifetime.

I 1st discovered epigenetics in mid ‘09 & couldn’t believe what I was reading.  As a grduate student who couldn’t decide between psychology & sociology & had always been suspicious of the rigid division between genes & the environment, this was welcome news indeed.  As educated people don’t accept evolutionary theory 150 yrs after Darwin proposed it, I wonder how long it will take for epigenetics to be accepted by the general public.

Epigenetic conditioning to group mores, environmental milieu, and acquired resistance to viral diseases has been observed over more than a century. It wasn’t named such in past decades, but is part of the Darwinian evolutionary matrix—the natural selective process of inherited genetic tendencies and heritable, acquired habits and proclivities.

I try to discuss this in part in my study, “Gaia and   of Midas, Univ. Press of America, April 2009.

-Richrd Krooth