Robert Karl Stonjek  wrote:

> Nick T
> not too long ago a news flash went through most big newspapers that
> (Swedish?) scientists found out that, if zour grandfather suffered
> from famine or so in the war, you could have stronger survival
> potentials.
> 
> This would somehow go in the direction of the good ole Lamarck-Theory,
> but after hours of internet research, I couldn't find the article
> mentioned above, just the fact that this area may be called
> "epigenetics".
> 
> Somebody can help me here?
> 
> RKS:
> Nick, I'm not familiar with the article but, on the surface at least,
> this looks like natural selection in action.
> 
> Most people die of starvation, those that survive are hardier, at least
> with regard to surviving starvation.  When conditions become tough,
> people try eating all sorts of things that they would otherwise refuse -
> rats, grass etc.  The survivors may be the ones that can stomach this
> sort of diet and so have a more hardy digestive system generally.
> 
> In other words, the starvation experience is less likely to be the cause
> of the hardier constitution and more likely to be the sieve that
> separates out the hardier from the weaker, leaving only the hardier
> examples behind.

Actually, it appears to be a kind of cytoplasmic imprinting - some genes
are suppressed by the results of lower metabolic rates over a few
generations. There is a non-nuclear inheritance going on. It was, I
think, in Nature a short while back (at least a summary, anyway).

It's hardly Lamarckian in any case; just a different kind of Darwinian
process acting on a different substrate of heredity.

-- 
John Wilkins
"Listen to your heart, not the voices in your head" - Marge Simpson
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 3/24/03 10:52:10 AM