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Did anyone else notice that there's been an increasing number of mildly successful research that hint towards Lamarckian evolution as being real sometimes? Has
by Jagat 8y ago
Did anyone else notice that there's been an increasing number of mildly successful research that hint towards Lamarckian evolution as being real sometimes?
Has something changed (either ease or impetus) that's made it easy to do such research?
Or does it have something to do with the fact that most people's conception of evolution is Lamarckian in nature?
Whenever I ask someone to describe evolution, they describe it
the way Lamarck thought it worked. And when I talk about natural selection, they say they need time to digest that.
- zerostar07 8y agoEpigenetics is a nascent field and it has become easier to get funding for such studies. That s my guess
- toasterlovin 8y agoThe way I conceptualize of it is that evolution is still almost entirely Darwinian, but that there's also a ton of other stuff that happens. Without wanting to get political, I think a good analogy would be human gender and sexuality. The statement that there are two human sexes, male and female, and that they seek each other out for the purpose of mating explains somewhere around 95% of what you see in humans. But human sexuality is complicated and to get to an explanation that encompasses 100% of what you observe requires vastly expanding your model of what's going on. So what's going on now with evolution is that we are discovering all the little ways in which evolution is complicated.
- CryoLogic 8y agoBut thats how all economic models work. The reliability of the model depends on how many standard deviations you go out to the left or right from the center. So I don't think it's anything really new.
- whatshisface 8y agoA slight mismatch in your analogy is that G&S studies doesn't explain anything, they just categorize it. They aren't proposing any mechanisms.
- toasterlovin 8y agoThere is definitely serious research into the causal mechanisms of homosexuality and transgenderism.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Analemma_ 8y agoBe aware that actual biologists wince when epigenetics and related phenomena are described as "Lamarckian evolution" (much like physicists do when quantum effects are claimed to be "proof" of non-materialism or New Age woo). They are superficially similar in their effects but the underlying mechanisms are very different and (as far as we know) epigenetic changes rarely persist beyond a few generations and probably can't impact populations very much.