When mice are exposed to enriched environments, their offspring can overcome genetic defects that impair long-term memory.
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Jennifer L. Barredo and Katherine E. Deeg are graduate students in the Neuroscience Department at Brown University.
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Add CommentWomen who were bored as teen agers may not give birth to challenged offspring, but it might be due as much to the timing of the pregnancy, if they were not bored in later life when they become pregnant. In the mouse model, the stimulation of the EE on knock-out mothers who were pregnant in an EE, may have had a big effect on the offspring in utero. It would be interesting to see what happens to the offspring if the knock-out mothers were raised in an EE, but transferred to a conventional environment upon becoming pregnant.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNatural selection alone is too slow. We are changing as we interact with our environment as new cells are formed and are influenced by external stimuli. Lamarckian theories are right...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would be interested in seeing the results of an assay where fertilized eggs are transplanted between the groups. This would shed some light on the mechanism of transfer between generations...does the secret lie simply in the gonads, in the uteran environment or in a combination of the two?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wouldn't say Lamarckian theories are right, per se...I don't think that this mechanism would work in too many instances. It seems to me that it's a matter of activating existing but dormant genes, which occurs constantly in nature. Passing the "activated" gene to a new generation could simply be a matter of the offspring being conceived and/or nurtured in an environment where the activating stimulus is present... A.K.A. the mothers womb. But, then again, I could be on the completely wrong track.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf Einstein's genius was due to but one genetic cause, there is a 50-50 chance that during reproduction it be discarded to the dustbin of evolution. If his children were intelligent, it was probably due to that genetic trait being inherited from Einstein's forbears. So intelligence is not inherited from Einstein's lifetime of intelligence, but from his and his wife's forebears disposition to have clever brains, if in the right environmental conditions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this*Striving* was a crucial component of Lamarckism. It wasn't just about environmental effects; more about organisms' responses to their environments. Were the rodents in these experiments tested for striving?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo. Their mental capacities, and those of their offspring, may have increased, but the former at least were not tested to have done so in a Lamarckian fashion, and so the characterisation of the results is somewhat misleading historically. I'll admit Lamarck is a slippery character when it comes to pinning down his ideas with precision, but I do think this article might have done a better job with its historiography.
This research invites serious debate. I hope Scientific American will invite major figures in evolutionary biology to weigh in on this hypothesis.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGreat article (despite the sensationalist headline, unfortunately an increasing SA trend). Genes can do nothing without environmental help - they can't even replicate in utero without external proteins. It's exciting how our understanding of gene-environment interactions is changing.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYeah man, even though I'm genetically predisposed to lottery tickets and supermarket tabloids, I still try to go to the art museum and the the ensemble society.
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