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Chicken or Egg? More Flirting with Lamarck

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Here’s a cute paper, “The Lamarckian chicken and the Darwinian egg,” in Biology Direct, by a couple of Israeli researchers. It’s open access so you can read the whole thing.

The Abstract is concise:

“Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg?” We suggest this question is not a paradox. The Modern Synthesis envisions speciation through genetic changes in germ cells via random mutations, an “Egg first” scenario, but perhaps epigenetic inheritance mechanisms can transmit adaptive changes initiated in the soma (“Chicken first”).

More:

In this commentary paper we wish to use the well-known “Chicken and Egg” paradox as a gateway for discussing different processes of evolution. While in the biological sense this is not a paradox at all, the metaphor is still useful because it allows examining of the distinction between Lamarckian and Darwinian evolution, and specifically, since it enables us to raise an important and unsolved question: “Can the phenotype affect the genotype?” or in other words, “can epigenetics translate into genetics”?

What makes speculative articles such as this ultimately disappointing is the absence of supporting data (i.e., evidence) for the mechanisms being proposed.

From a philosophical standpoint, however, the speculations are fascinating — because they indicate what researchers are willing to try, in the face of the supposed “highly confirmed” status of textbook evolutionary theory.

If the current Darwinian theory were in such good shape, why do so many people keep wandering off into heresy?

Image: � Iosif Szasz-Fabian / Dollar Photo Club.

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