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If there is an afterlife, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has had a roller-coaster of a ride. His life went well enough at
first, defined early by honors gained on the battlefield and in the lab. Lamarck was a proponent of evolution
many decades before Darwin, enjoying a briefly relevant career which saw him co-invent the evolutionary
tree and even help coin the term biology. But by the time Lamarck died, he was penniless and nearly
alone, ridiculed by large portions of an establishment which knew beyond all doubt that species were fixed
and immutable. 30 years before the Origin of Species, Lamarck died a blind and sickly evolutionist, his
body dumped in a lime pit. A scientific rival even used his eulogy to voice one last professional dig.
You might expect that such an early supporter of evolution would be vindicated in a post-Darwinian world,
but since his death Lamarck has arguably had an even harder go than he did while alive. You see, Lamarck
was one of the first scientists to gain any traction with the idea that species evolve thanks to behavioral
attributes in the parents and while he was ahead of the curve on evolution in general, this fact left him as
an involuntary poster-boy for bad science and bankrupt evolutionary theory. Despite having died long
before Darwin ever proposed his theory of natural selection, a deceased Lamarck became an involuntary
foil for the greatest scientist of the day.

Poor guy.
Yet now, more than 180 years after his death, Lamarcks hypotheses may finally be gaining some popular
support. Cutting-edge studies in biology and genetics seem to be finding controversial new evidence in
favor of his ideas. The 18th-century naturalist of course had no idea about the nuances of epigenetic
inheritance or of genetics at all but if he deserved even a portion of the derision hes provoked so far,
then he certainly deserves some credit now that the tables have turned. To understand exactly what form
this redemption is taking, and how Lamarck may have been partially right, we have to look at the concept
of evolution as Darwin first proposed it.
A restrictive revolution
You have to remember that when Charles Darwin climbed aboard the deck of HMS Beagle and set off on
his grand upperclassmans adventure through the Galapagos Isles, the world had already heard about
evolution. In fact, scientists had at that point already done a fair bit of extra-Biblical mulling on the origin
of species, and indeed on the descent of man, as well.

The Galapagos provided Darwin with easy-to-see branched evolutionary trees.
What Darwin discovered on those islands was not the idea that species evolved, nor even a possible model
for how that evolution might have taken place. Rather, what he found was a naturally occurring laboratory,
one exquisitely shaped to allow the study of speciation and to make his model the first supported by real
evidence. Darwin ultimately owes the near-instant success of his theory to the fact that the islands of the
Galapagos made such perfect petri dishes for generating that evidence. His ability to see this fact, and
exploit it so brilliantly, is why we remember Charles Darwin today.
Though were talking here about the revenge of Lamarck, dont take that to mean that natural selection
has been overturned. Natural selection is still largely unchanged from Darwins original version, and is still
the overwhelmingly important force behind biological evolution. In the decades since their deaths weve
gained the ability study genetic information at the level of populations, proving Darwins theories more
powerfully than he ever could have. We now know that natural selection is supplemented by things like
molecular linkage and genetic drift, but these add to Darwins thinking rather than contradicting it.
By introducing evidence into the discussion, Darwin (and Alfred Russel Wallace) effectively annihilated all
other avenues of evolutionary thought. It was a bittersweet revolution for those scientists who had built
their reputations on evolution; while evolution in general was gaining truly incredible momentum, its
proponents began to reject all but the most strictly Darwinian explanations for it. Scientists who ought to
have gotten at least some credit as Darwins theoretical forebears were instead vilified as symbols of the
Old Way, the out-of-touch coots who refused to accept that natural selection was the one and only source of
diversity in life on Earth.

Lamarck was wrong
What makes this story of scientific hubris complex is that it was mostly justified. Make no mistake: Every
Lamarckian argument Lamarck ever made was wrong, in the concrete sense. Lamarckian evolution says
that, for instance, if you work out a lot you will have more heavily muscled children. This is not true.
However, it is at least thematically related to the a growing body of evidence suggesting that certain
behaviors and life experiences can be inherited. We think of DNA as the hereditary molecule, but
everything we know says that these heritable experiences cannot be changing the sequence of the genome
in any directed way so whats happening?

Any heritable change in any of these elements except the DNA sequence is an epigenetic change. That
includes proteins, RNAs, and non-sequence-changing modifications to DNA.
The answer almost certainly lies outside of the DNA itself. We wouldnt expect childhood trauma, for
instance, to change one version of a gene into another, and any changes in expression level that it did cause
would not be passed down to later generations. Even if something as blunt as trauma might cause some
equally blunt genetic problem, like the fraying of chromosome ends, this likely would not be passed down
because it probably wouldnt occur in the sperm or egg cells. Its so clear the DNA sequence cannot be the
culprit in this case that the field mostly dedicated to investigating it was named epigenetics (literally,
outside or around genetics).
Epigenetics is the study of any heritable trait which is not derived from the sequence of DNA. Its a new
and quickly progressing field with new papers published every month. Note that while not everything in
epigenetics is Lamarckian, all real-world Lamarckian inheritance is likely epigenetic in nature. Major
studies from just the past few years have found that methylation of RNAs (transient companion molecules
to DNA) can be heritable, and have startlingly powerful effects. Its an open question how these epigenetic
factors might influence evolution that is, inheritance writ large in time and population.
If epigenetic inheritance can persist long enough to drive evolution, then Lamarck will have been at least
been partially vindicated on the molecular scale. Thats likely a big part of the reason that the field has
garnered so much controversy, as it hearkens back to natural selections most roundly discredited rival. If a
pesticide could affect rat offspring for as much as four generations after exposure, thats uncomfortably
close to the most roundly discredited alternative to Darwinism ever. That pesticide study, one of the big
early papers in the field, is controversial to this day.
By far the best reason for that skepticism is that there is very currently little known about the mechanisms
involved; even irrefutable proof that rats can pass down acquired sperm counts wouldnt necessarily say
anything about how that might occur. When youre working in a substance as ephemeral as inherited
characteristics, being ignorant of how something occurs is not all that far from being ignorant of whether it
occurs at all.

This is a hugely simplified look at the tree of life. Epigenetics could make this much, much more
complicated.
If, as has been suggested, childhood trauma is detectable in the methylation states of certain genes for
several generations, that doesnt necessarily mean anything for evolution; its only an evolutionary
mechanism if it really lasts. As in the rat study, however, it seems that time may actually heal all wounds; a
multigenerational shock response wont direct the species if its effects always fade, generation to
generation. And if the response is actually useful for example, if a trauma causes a multi-generational
increase in panic response, which leads to fewer traumas and thus less panic response in later generations
these changes could actively snuff out its own mechanism of action.
So, in a way, the name of Lamarck is as ill-used here as a standard-bearer as it has been for so long as a
scapegoat. Evolutionary biologists all over the world are working on finding evidence of whether
epigenetic changes have influenced evolution hopefully in a way we can usefully study. However,
epigenetics has been referred to as a black box for biologists, a huge unknown space that by its very
nature resists study. How can you collect evidence about transient chemical modifications up to several
billion years ago?
Next page: A new paradigm
A new paradigm?
We are in the middle of a scientific revolution the likes of which has not been seen since Darwin himself.
Though science has made enormous strides in the large-scale study of DNA, fields like genomics have
functioned mostly to confirm Darwinism and flesh out our understanding of just how true it is. Epigenetics
offers the first hint of a directed system thats complementary to Darwinism, not a source of random
change like genetic drift, but of ordered response to environment.
Oliver Rando, an epigenetics researcher at the University of Massachusetts, recently asked, Why hasnt
this been obvious to all the brilliant researchers in the past hundred years of genetics? Its a legitimate
question. After all, it sort-of makes sense that evolution would find a way to somehow absorb and account
for intra-generational pressures; being able to hand such a quick-response advantage to your children
without the need to wait thousands of years would be an enormous advantage.
The problem was that, sensible or not, there was absolutely no evidence for this idea. Its a bit of a chicken-
egg problem: was there no research because we had no evidence to inspire it, or did we lack the evidence
because we made no attempt to find it?

Image courtesy of Nature Magazine.
Today, we have reason to believe that epigenetics is involved in high levels of obesity and even asthma. If
evolutionary biology is indeed the most appropriate field to understand the spread of these (possibly)
epigenetic issues, then evolution could be in for another stint as the sexiest science in town. We may very
well look back at the past few decades of evolutionary biology as the lull, and the coming few as the storm.
Now, Im not claiming to know to truth of inheritance. Its entirely possible (though at this point unlikely)
that all this epigenetics stuff will come to nothing, or near to it. Certainly, we may also find that epigenetics
is interesting to doctors and geneticists but meaningless to evolutionary biologists. Still, the sheer
possibility of these discoveries makes them important. Has evolution been shaped by forces so subtle that
well never realistically tease out the truth? Is biological evolution a black box without a bottom?
These questions are a major source, if not the main source, of controversy in biology today. Its important
to understand the history behind this issue, because otherwise you might not understand why epigenetics
would meet with so much resistance not just skepticism about the results but resistance to even
conducting the research in the first place. A combination of genuine disbelief and professional nervousness
is likely behind this rejection, and the neo-Lamarckians will need quite a bit of evidence to overcome it.
As that evidence arrives in support of one side or the other, youll now at least be able to tell which side
won and which will be the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck to an all-new generation.