In Exodus 20:5 (NEB) it is written, “You shall now bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. I punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generations of those who hate me.”
In Mapping Reality (Maartens, 2006:66) I wrote, “The God of the Old Testament (‘YHVH’) is a truly merciless, cruel, and above all very jealous. If you do wrong or cross him, He (yes, He IS male – at least in the Old Testament) will hunt you down with your most horrible enemies, disease, hunger, and pestilence.
“He will persecute you and your descendents for three generations. This God is more terrible than your worst nightmare. No wonder the Jews have suffered so much through their history. However, they surely have not suffered without reason – they unquestionably must have angered their God. Thank ‘God’ my parents were not like Him! But, luckily our views of God develops over time – remember Gershom Scholem‘s structure of religion!”
Well, now there is scientific evidence that God will punish children and grandchildren for the sins of their ancestors. This is done genetically. For the longest time we have been told the DNA sequence is all there is to the human genetic code. However, it turns out this is not true at all. The new field of epigenetics is showing that there is a lot more as was illustrated in the BBC’s Horizon documentary The Ghost in Your Genes.
Traditional genetics espoused the view that each new organism got fresh DNA from its parent, but Marcus Pembrey working on genetic diseases of children in London began to suspect otherwise when he found one chromosomal defect causing two very different syndromes (Angelman syndrome and Prader-Willi syndrome) depending on which parent was the source of the defect.
Work on mice and the careful correlation of harvest and medical records from an isolated Swedish community shows that epigenetic effects can be passed from generation to generation.
When the Human Genome project was completed and the number of genes found in the Human Genome was found to be insufficient to explain the complexity of our biology researchers have turned to epigenetic switches to explain disease. (See <http://www.vea.com.au/TN/11313035.pdf>)
Conventional biology has always believed that our genetic inheritance is set in stone at the moment of our conception. At that instant, we each receive a set of chromosomes from both our mother and father. Within these chromosomes are the genes: strips of coded DNA, the basic unit of inheritance. After conception, it was assumed that our genes are locked away inside every cell of the body, protected and untouched by the way you live.
Therefore, what you do in your life may affect you, but your genes remain untainted, unchanged for future generations. In classic genetics, your parents and grandparents simply pass on their genes. The experiences they accumulate in a lifetime are never inherited – lost forever as the genes pass untouched through generation after generation.
Nevertheless, epigenetics is the study of epigenetic inheritance, a set of reversible heritable changes in gene function or other cell phenotype that occur without a change in DNA sequence (genotype). These changes may be induced spontaneously, in response to environmental factors, or in response to the presence of a particular allele, even if it is absent from subsequent generations.
Epigenetics is distinct from epigenesis, which is the long-accepted description of embryonic morphogenesis as a gradual process of increasing complexity, in which organs are formed de novo (as opposed to preformationism).
However, cellular differentiation processes crucial for epigenesis rely almost entirely on epigenetic rather than genetic inheritance from one cell generation to the next. If this were not so, then somatic cell, cloning would be impossible, because a normal organism could not be recovered from a differentiated cell nucleus. Because cell differentiation is epigenetic, a somatic cell can be reprogrammed to become totipotent.
One of the few exceptions to this is the rearrangement of genes in the adaptive immune system – an organism cloned from a memory B cell would lack the ability to generate a full range of immunoglobulins because a portion of the DNA has been irreversibly (genetically) deleted from the genome.
Epigenetics includes the study of effects that are inherited from one cell generation to the next whether these occur in embryonic morphogenesis, regeneration, normal turnover of cells, tumours, cell culture, or the replication of single celled organisms.
Recently, there has been increasing interest in the idea that some forms of epigenetic inheritance may be maintained even through the production of germ cells (meiosis), and therefore may endure from one generation to the next in multicellular organism. (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigenetics>)
Genomic imprinting is the phenomenon whereby a small subset of all the genes in the genome is expressed according to their parent of origin. Some imprinted genes are expressed from a maternally inherited chromosome and silenced on the paternal chromosome; while other imprinted genes show the opposite expression pattern and are only expressed from a paternally inherited chromosome. Contrary to expectation, ‘imprints’ can act as a silencer or an activator for imprinted genes.
Normally, a healthy child inherits two sets of chromosomes, one from the mother, and one from the father. A living child (this applies to all mammals) cannot be produced when both sets of chromosomes come from the same parent because imprinted gene expression will be unbalanced. Because of the way imprints work, a foetus that has two maternal sets of chromosomes will have twice the normal level of some imprinted genes, and completely lack expression of other imprinted genes.
No naturally occurring cases of parthenogenesis exist in mammals because of imprinted genes. Experimental manipulation of a paternal methylation imprint controlling the Igf2 gene, however, has recently allowed the creation of rare individual mice with two maternal sets of chromosomes, but this is not a true parthenogenote. Hybrid offspring of two species may exhibit unusual growth due to the novel combination of imprinted genes. (See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imprinting_(genetics)>)
Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829) is the pioneer French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired traits are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is disputed by Darwinian theory.
In the history of biology, Lamarck invented the great chain of being. By insisting that mind is immanent in living creatures and could determine their transformations, he escaped from the negative directional premise that the perfect must always precede the imperfect. He then proposed a theory of ‘transformism’ (evolution) which started from infusoria and ended with humans.
Lamarck imagined a vast sequence of life forms extending like a series of staircases from the simplest to the most complex. Impelled by ‘excitations’ and ‘subtle and ever-moving fluids’, the organs of animals became more complex and took their place on successively higher levels. This was the summary view of the relationship between physical energy and the overall organisation of life set forth in Recherches sur l’organisation des corps vivants (1802, ‘Research on the Organization of Living Bodies’) and the Philosophie zoologique (1809, Zoological Philosophy).
In the latter work he stated two ‘laws’ that he held to govern the ascent of life to higher stages: first, that organs are improved with repeated use and weakened by disuse; second, that such environmentally determined acquisitions or losses of organs ‘are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise’.
Thus, in a celebrated example, the forelegs and neck of giraffes have become lengthened through their habit of browsing. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species 50 years later, these views of Lamarck became the centre of interest and controversy. Lamarckism was discredited by most geneticists after the 1930s, except in the Soviet Union, where, as Lysenkoism, it dominated Soviet genetics until the 1960s.
As originally formulated, however, Lamarckism was part of an elaborate surmise about processes for whose operation Lamarck had no direct evidence.
From a lifelong, direct exposure to plants and animals, Lamarck gained an intuitive sense of the dynamic quality of life, the close interdependence of physical and vital processes upon which the modern science of biology rests.
Indeed Lamarck was the first to use the word biology, in 1802, and now he also seemed to have been correct and Charles Darwin wrong!
It makes one wonder, what else could be wrong?
