Tag Archives: perceptions of epigenetics

Does Epigenetics Prove Lamarck Right?

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Chris Womack

It seems like every article about epigenetics in the popular press includes a sentence about how maybe, just maybe this new finding or other proves that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was right some 200 years ago. He famously tied “acquired traits” — characteristics an individual accumulates during its life, such as muscular arms — into a broader theory of how species evolve. The most recent version I’ve seen is in the Sept 8 New York Times opinion piece “Why Fathers Really Matter,” though it’s indirect and noncommittal, as Lamarck comparisons tend to be: Epigenetics proves that we are the products of history, public as well as private, in parts of us that are so intimately ours that few people ever imagined that … Continue reading →

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‘Intelligent Design’ Crowd Projecting onto Epigenetics Too?

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Chris Womack

Seems like “Intelligent Design” proponents are adopting epigenetics in their newest argument that Darwin had it all wrong. Published in February, The Mysterious Epigenome: What Lies Beyond DNA, by theology professor Thomas Woodward and cataract surgeon James Gills, takes readers on a tour of biological molecules and processes, describing flagella, DNA, RNA, and so forth, to eventually conclude that it’s all far too complex to have evolved at all. Here’s a quote from the book posted by an admirer: [T]he epigenome adds tremendous pressure to the already-weak Darwinian explanatory apparatus. Random changes, inherited over generations, must not just explain the explosion of DNA as one moves up the purported tree of life; one must also now explain by these mindless … Continue reading →

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Epigenetics – You Bring Your Own Goofy Preconceptions to IT

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Chris Womack

Rooting through the swamps looking for ill-advised uses of epigenetics as I do, I found a really fun one. A roundabout justification for using epigenetics as — get this — a mechanism by which cell phones cause cancer.

Posted in Applications, Chromatin Structure | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

The Critical Window, Epigenetics, and Stress — and Maybe Mental Health too

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Chris Womack

The past few weeks have been good for stress. Two labs published studies supporting the idea that stress during sensitive periods in early development can cause epigenetic changes affecting how an organism turns out. These studies look at mice and humans, respectively. I’m diving into the mouse study today — it’s got two kinds of epigenetics: an inherited, probably chromatin-mark imprinting angle; and an miRNA angle. I’ll get to the human study from the Kobor lab next time. As an aside, I find “stress and epigenetics”  especially interesting because I’m always looking for clues about how this new-ish field is perceived and represented by the lay public, and “stress” is a lay-public magnet. As I’ve talked about before, aside from … Continue reading →

Posted in Behavioral Epigenetics, DNA Methylation | Tagged , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Epigenetics and Genius

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Chris Womack

When Santiago Ramón y Cajal was 11, he blew up the town gate with a cannon he made. He was irascible, combative, and possibly a genius — at 54, he shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with rival Camillo Golgi for piecing together an early understanding of the nervous system. Still, Golgi believed the nervous system was all one connected “net,” and Ramón y Cajal fought for the view that it’s made of millions of interacting but separate cells. We’ve discovered several caveats, but Ramón y Cajal was pretty much right. He was right about a lot. So when Scientific American Mind asked its Twitter followers this week for geniuses its staff might’ve missed for a feature … Continue reading →

Posted in History & Trends | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

The Other Epigenetics Enthusiasts – the Meditators, et al.

Posted on July 1, 2011 by Chris Womack

Back in April, I mentioned the belief among some folks that healthier gene expression patterns were a matter of thinking or believing or perceiving things in a special way. Anyway, I said I’d get back to the subject, and here I am! After looking into it a bit more, it seems to me like epigenetics has two main groups of cheerleaders. There are the scientists and geeks like myself, and a second group made up of spiritualists or mysticists like Bruce Lipton. But no matter how much of it I read, I’m never quite sure what the mysticists find so interesting about epigenetics, nor whether they’re even talking about the same thing. ERV over at Science Blogs is somewhat less … Continue reading →

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