The heritability of epigenetic markers is still a debated topics and this will no doubt add fuel to that debate, but it seems that mice conditioned to associate fear with certain specific smells can transmit this fear to their offspring as a type of genetic memory.
Full story at link. Similar article in New Scientist.
Once again it looks like scientific dogma may once again get turned on its head.
that’s scary. glad i’m not a meese.
No. This is what bugs me about the breathless excitement with which epigenetics has been reported in the popular press. This is NOT Lamarckian evolution. This is NOT DNA somehow being changed in response to experience. It is GENE REGULATION, nothing more or less. The DNA sequence itself is utterly unchanged. It is moderately interesting to discover that regulatory states can be passed on from generation to generation, but frankly, it wasn’t all that surprising, since we already knew that large-scale effects like heterochromatin were heritable.
It’s an interesting new wrinkle. It is NOT “turning scientific dogma on its head”.
It’s not Lamarckian but it certainly is turning dogma on its head. I’ve seen enough of the reporting on the heritability of epigenetic markers in recent years to know that this came as quite a surprise to people in the field and the field itself is very, very young.
I love how certain people try to down play these things after the fact when 10 or 20 years ago you almost literally would have been burned at the stake for even suggesting such nonsense. Fortunately, some of us ignorant lay folk know better. 
edit: and by the way, I put that comment in there deliberately just to see if I would get precisely that sort of reaction from people who would try to pretend that this wasn’t a big deal - as happens with so many of my posts. But keep it up, because I certainly intend to.
Oh, nonsense.
Look, if you want to play your little games, fine. Go have fun. I’m in the field and up on the research, and I’ve said my piece. If you, as a “layperson”, want to believe something else, go for it. I’m done.
That’s nice. I’ve known plenty of people who are also ‘in the field’ including researchers, post docs, etc. So if you want to play the authority card that’s cool. It will work on most people but I know better. I’ve talked to and socialized with enough of these folks to know how things work and what makes the wheels of grant money turn. And I will say it once again, this is groundbreaking stuff.