You Are What You Your Mother Eats

New research continues to reveal biology’s complex adaptation capabilities broadly referred to as epigenetics. Simply put, individuals not only respond physiologically to environmental challenges by modifying their DNA, they also pass such adaptations on to their progeny. It is, by any other name, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, a concept evolutionists have resisted for almost a century. Now researchers studying mice have found that a mother’s diet not only during pregnancy, but before pregnancy, causes intelligent adaptations to occur that are passed on to the offspring—a finding that once was cause for blackballing. Now, molecular machines that (i) sense environmental shifts, (ii) produce the desired response, and (iii) pass that response on to offspring arose by chance, and were later selected. What was once unacceptable anathema is now becoming orthodoxy in what we know to be the fact of evolution. As Darwin explained:

Whether the naturalist believes in the views given by Lamarck, by Geoffroy St. Hilaire, by the author of the ‘Vestiges,’ by Mr. Wallace and myself, or in any other such view, signifies extremely little in comparison with the admission that species have descended from other species, and have not been created immutable; for he who admits this as a great truth has a wide field opened to him for further inquiry.

It isn’t that we know how life has arisen so much as we know how life has not arisen. That’s how science works sometimes.