Trends in Ecology & Evolution
OpinionRethinking heredity, again
Section snippets
A scientific revolution undone?
A fundamental assumption of classical Mendelian genetics and the evolutionary Modern Synthesis is that heredity is ‘hard’ – that is, mediated by the transmission of gene alleles that are impervious to environmental influence. By the standard historical narrative, the exclusive validity of the Mendelian model of heredity was established through the culmination of a lengthy scientific debate 1, 2, 3. According to Mayr's authoritative history [3], the possibility of ‘soft’ or ‘Lamarckian’
The hard/soft dichotomy
The roots of the scientific study of heredity, the attempt to understand why and how traits such as personality, facial features and certain diseases run in families, can be traced back to the 18th century [13]. Of the many competing ideas from this early period, two views of heredity – hard versus soft [14] – crystallized, by the late 19th century, into a dichotomy that has been at the center of the inheritance debate ever since (Box 2). Proponents of hard heredity believed that parents
Nongenetic inheritance
Over the past three decades, several research programs have explored various nongenetic mechanisms of inheritance that operate in parallel with Mendelian-genetic inheritance. Nongenetic inheritance comprises all vertical (i.e. parent–offspring) mechanisms of inheritance (other than the transmission of DNA sequence variation), including transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, somatic inheritance, environmental inheritance, and behavioral or cultural inheritance 6, 7, 8, 10. A common feature of
A pluralistic model of heredity
The model of heredity now emerging is pluralistic [12], or ‘inclusive’ [8] or ‘extended’ [60], in that it combines genetic and nongenetic mechanisms of inheritance 7, 8, 10. The pluralistic model therefore recognizes the reality of both hard and soft inheritance, and the potential for a range of intermediate phenomena.
A corollary of the pluralistic model is variation in the nature of inheritance among different traits and taxa, spanning a continuum from purely genetic to purely nongenetic.
Concluding remarks
I argue that the rejection of soft inheritance by influential 20th-century geneticists reflected two key ideas: a narrowed definition of heredity as the transmission of DNA sequences at conception, and the belief that heredity is mediated by a single, universal mechanism of transmission. As a corollary of these ideas, many leading geneticists assumed that soft inheritance, if it occurs, must involve the modification of germ-line DNA sequences by environmental or somatic factors – a process that
Glossary
- Acquired trait
- a phenotypic character (trait) induced by the environment or arising spontaneously during an individual's lifetime.
- Behavioral/cultural inheritance
- the transmission from parents to offspring of variation in behavior or culture via imitation or learning by offspring (and, in some cases, teaching by parents).
- Biased mutation
- mutation that is non-random in that particular environmental factors tend to induce particular changes in the DNA sequence.
- Environmental inheritance
- the transmission
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