"It is as though nature employs epigenesis to make long-lasting adjustments to an individual’s genetic program to suit his or her personal circumstances, much as in Lamarck’s notion of 'striving for perfection.'"
It would be something of a category error to see a rehabilitation of Lamarckism in these discoveries. They show that our previous understanding of information flow across generations was incomplete, but it does not challenge the understanding that evolution occurs through variation and selection.
One fundamental problem for Lamarckism is 'how does the body know what is good for it?' Lamarck used as an example the idea that blacksmiths' sons had stronger arms on account of their fathers' work (I do not know whether he considered their daughters...) Putting aside the question of whether that is actually true, suppose that blacksmiths were also prone to musculoskeletal occupational injury. How is the body to 'know' that the stronger arms are desirable but the injury is not, especially if the former is promoted by the micro-injury of constant hammering?
The rest of the article contains within itself a long list of deleterious consequences of epigenetic inheritance. While the epigenetic mechanisms probably constrain (or perhaps expand the possibilities for) variation, it does not present a fundamental challenge to Darwinian evolution.
It would be something of a category error to see a rehabilitation of Lamarckism in these discoveries. They show that our previous understanding of information flow across generations was incomplete, but it does not challenge the understanding that evolution occurs through variation and selection.
One fundamental problem for Lamarckism is 'how does the body know what is good for it?' Lamarck used as an example the idea that blacksmiths' sons had stronger arms on account of their fathers' work (I do not know whether he considered their daughters...) Putting aside the question of whether that is actually true, suppose that blacksmiths were also prone to musculoskeletal occupational injury. How is the body to 'know' that the stronger arms are desirable but the injury is not, especially if the former is promoted by the micro-injury of constant hammering?
The rest of the article contains within itself a long list of deleterious consequences of epigenetic inheritance. While the epigenetic mechanisms probably constrain (or perhaps expand the possibilities for) variation, it does not present a fundamental challenge to Darwinian evolution.