Oops, “Environmental Information May Be Inherited Transgenerationally”

More Incoming

Drug addictions and neuropsychiatric illnesses seem to recur in parents and their children in a cycle that is difficult to break. As neurobiologist Kerry Ressler explains “There are a lot of anecdotes to suggest that there’s intergenerational transfer of risk.” But until recently evolutionists denied—and actively persecuted scientists suggesting—any such thing. For evolutionary theory has traditionally viewed heritable changes as being strictly channeled through DNA and its chance mutations which are selected when they happen to improve fitness. Thus, according to modern evolutionary theory, all inherited change that ever occurs to a species is, ultimately, from a source that is random. Non random heritable change that might be directed or influenced by environmental challenges is not allowed. No teleology, no final causes, no design.

Those are the metaphysical ground rules. But for decades undeniable evidence has once again contradicted evolutionary dogma. There is no question that species respond rapidly to environmental challenges with non random change. One of the mechanisms, referred to as epigenetics, involves small chemical tags, such as methyl groups, attached to DNA or its histone packaging proteins. But as one science writer warned, “For some evolutionary biologists, just hearing the term epigenetics raises hackles.” Or as one evolutionist admitted, “The really heretical thing to say is that the environment could be pushing the epigenetic information in a direction that is beneficial … that raises the hackles.”

Aside from violating evolution’s ground rules against heritable directed change, otherwise known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, epigenetics takes the unlikeliness of evolution to an entirely new level. We would have to believe that evolution’s undirected, random change somehow created an astonishingly complex adaptation machine. In short, we would have to believe the mother of all just-so stories, namely that “Not only has life evolved, but life has evolved to evolve.”

Not only do the sheer intricacies and interdependencies of epigenetics, and the lack of an evolutionary fitness pathway, rule out an evolutionary origin, but the violation of Occam’s Razor is colossal. We must believe that evolution created a profoundly complex machine which just happens to facilitate an entirely new form of adaptation. From a scientific perspective epigenetics reveals another absurdity of evolution.

And Ressler’s new study published last month demonstrating transgenerational inheritance of environmental information in mice—at behavioral, neuroanatomical and epigenetic levels—is just making it worse.

Ressler and postdoc Brian Dias exposed the mice simultaneously to electric shocks and a particular odor. Soon the odor alone caused abnormal behavioral responses. Next, they observed such abnormal behavioral responses in subsequent generations which had not been exposed to any electrical shocks. And this transgenerational inheritance occurred both via the mother and via the father.

Of course there is much more to learn, but this important research is yet another example of how evolution has held back scientific. Evolution did not motivate this research—quite the opposite. Consider how a science writer in a leading journal introduced the work:

According to convention, the genetic sequences contained in DNA are the only way to transmit biological information across generations. Random DNA mutations, when beneficial, enable organisms to adapt to changing conditions, but this process typically occurs slowly over many generations. Yet some studies have hinted that environmental factors can influence biology more rapidly through 'epigenetic' modifications, which alter the expression of genes, but not their actual nucleotide sequence.

Hinted? Sorry but evolutionary dogma notwithstanding, the rapid and directed heritable change in populations—the inheritance of acquired characteristics—has not merely been “hinted.” It is well established science no matter how much evolutionists push back.

But evolutionary dogma does push back against science, and this new study was met with the usual skepticism. One evolutionist is incredulous:

The claims they make are so extreme they kind of violate the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

Another evolutionist finds the claims to be unnerving:

It's pretty unnerving to think that our germ cells could be so plastic and dynamic in response to changes in the environment.

Extreme? Extraordinary? Unnerving? I guess so when you insist that the species, and everything else for that matter, must have arisen spontaneously.

Religion drives science, and it matters.