Why everything you've been told about evolution is wrong....

including feast or famine experiences affecting later offspring's longevity.

Epigenetics

In the 1980s, Dr. Lars Olov Bygren, a preventive-health specialist who is now at the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, began to wonder what long-term effects the feast and famine years might have had on children growing up in Norrbotten in the 19th century ? and not just on them but on their kids and grandkids as well..........

For instance, Bygren's research showed that in Overkalix, boys who enjoyed those rare overabundant winters ? kids who went from normal eating to gluttony in a single season ? produced sons and grandsons who lived shorter lives...........

The answer lies beyond both nature and nurture. Bygren's data ? along with those of many other scientists working separately over the past 20 years ? have given birth to a new science called epigenetics. At its most basic, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene activity that do not involve alterations to the genetic code but still get passed down to at least one successive generation..........

Stress levels in chickens to global warming.

Interesting.

Mark

does in a way confirm a form of Lysenkoism. Lysenko was Stalin's favourite geneticist and basically though that if you sent people into the Arctic without clothes, they would grow fur in response to the stress change. Palpable idiocy, but Stalin liked it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenko,_Trofim_Denisovich
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism

Darwinian evolution. Apply a stress on huge number of a single species, wait a few hundred generations and see who have survived and what changes have occurred. You can't get any idea of Darwinian evolution from less than two generations.

You can however so overstress the organism (chicken) so severely that their reproduction becomes disrupted, thus proving that stress can within a single generation cause genetic mutation. How that will affect survivability over thousands of generations remains to be seen.

Rob

It does tend to prove that Mendel's theories were incomplete but that's a different subject. We've known for a long time that inheritance is a complex process and that classical genetics accounts for only some of the observations.

I AM a creationist, but I don't think epigenetics is an argument I want to use in discrediting evolution.

A large number of Scientists and other people have advanced a Theory to explain short term data. It is those people who are generally belittled ("Take away Al Gore's Nobel Prize") by those who disagree.

Things are happening that we don't understand. There has been significant melting in the Northern and in the Southern Hemispheres. There have been significant changes to ocean currents particularly the Antarctic Current that comes up the coast of Chile, and which gives rise to El Nino and La Nina events which affect US climate so much.

The Jet Stream has drifted way north in Canada (it usually runs more or less along the 49th Parallel, but now it goes up above the 60th. Little snow on the prairies, warm temperatures all across Canada to at least Quebec. Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and New Brunswick have taken a beating as has the North Eastern US.

But we don't know for certain why. Why was there such drought in the 1930's. Why was it so warm in Europe from about 700 AD to 1100 AC, and then so damn' cold from 1370 through to 1540. I think we can safely dismiss Man Made Global Climate Change for those. Why was Libya the "Bread basket" of the Roman Empire until the 4th Century AC, but since then the desert has been spreading. There are extensive indications that the Sahara 10,000 years ago was wet temperate and incredibly fertile, lots of rivers, lakes and vegetation.

The whole thing is a puzzle. One group of people think that calling a halt to everything is prudent, particularly given the ongoing and skyrocketting CO2 emissions from India and China. Let's just let the Scientists try to figure this out. It took about 80 years for Darwinian Evolution to be broadly, but not universally accepted. 80 years from now, my grandchildren may know the answer, but I doubt my son will, unless he gets a letter from the King, or the Queen or whatever. (people who reach 100 in Britain receive a letter signed by the Queen).

Rob