Since, as I recall, one of the first strong clues as to the reality of epigenetic inheritance involved the grandchildren of people who had experienced food shortage and starvation, something which if you google "epigenetics starvation" you will find there is robust evidence to support of the kind which there is not for most if not all claims of "natural selection." How people are treated in their lives has an enduring and morally potent effect which removes even some strong aspects of biological inheritance from merely materialist analysis.
I don't have time to search for what I remember but the first thing I remember hearing about was the effect of food deprivation, as I recall during the pre-Communist period, echoing in the grandchildren of impoverished Russian Jews.
That effect is robustly demonstrated and it could not more possibly be relevant to what I said about the Nazis and their fellows in others practicing organized hate explained in Darwinian terms. Here, from a report on the Medical Daily website.
In 1944, the Nazis blocked food supplies from entering the western Netherlands, and a period of widespread famine quickly followed. Researchers observed the effect that starvation of pregnant women had on their children, but at that time had no idea what caused this to happen. Today, with the help of expanded knowledge and more advanced technology, the researchers were able to solve the mystery of inheriting life experiences. “We identified genes that are essential for production and for the inheritance of starvation-responsive small RNAs,” Rechavi said.
Our DNA’s "memory" is essentially its ability to pass on response templates for the needs of specific cells. The small RNAs are a species of regulatory RNA-molecules that regulate gene express. In the starved worms, starvation-responsive small RNAs were produced. These molecules were found to be involved in nutrition and incredibly were passed on through at least three generation of worms. “We were also surprised to find that the great-grandchildren of the starved worms had an extended life span,” Rechavi said.
The researchers speculate the mechanism functions as a way for parents to “prepare their progeny for hardships similar to the ones that they experience.” This would give them a better chance at survival and more importantly a better chance at passing on DNA.
I'd say that is an excellent example of three things:
First, it demonstrates that the immoral behavior of governments in depriving people of food has an enduring effect on not only those who experience the starvation, not only on their offspring, but on the succeeding generations, and so they an effect on the development of the affected population and, it's not an unreasonable assumption, on "evolution".
Second, it demonstrates that the effects of those non-material, intentional, human choices by governments can have effects that show up in the cellular chemistry of the organisms so effected, not only in humans but also in the c. elegans scientists so love to torture in their work.
Third, it proves that these discoveries, vastly complicating the mother of all just-so stories, natural selection - I would say further complicating it out of any rationally believed in existence - will, never-the-less generate an explanatory scheme told in terms of natural selection out of the habits of the scientists telling the tale, habits learned out the required framing taught in order to make sure the scientists conformed to the conventional orthodoxy, I would say ideology, of their profession.
For the first child of Darwinism, of natural selection, the homicidal, genocidal offspring worse than the criminal degenerates that Darwinists lied into existence to push natural selection, eugenics, these epigenetic discoveries couldn't possibly be more disconfirming. The intentional acts of humans have a robust and durable effect on the inheritance of future generations, effects we are only just beginning to identify and are even farther from understanding.
These effects so discovered in the early decades of this neo-Lamarckian (if you want to call it by some inaccurate historical title) revolution are, almost certainly, a tiny sample of such enduring and important factors for evolution.
Who knows what unobserved, unnoticed, unsuspected epigenetic effects there are, it certainly took them long enough to scientifically notice what they have. It could be that there are aspects of even this one newly discovered epigenetic factor, starvation in the grandparents generation, has aspects of it that would render the optimism derived from observation of the longevity of the descendants of c. elegans a deception.
I will also note that claims that the discoveries so easily made in the tiny worms are directly relevant to the much different organisms we humans are, is also an unwarranted and most definitely ideological non-genetic inheritance from the line of Charles Darwin.
If there is one thing that evolutionary biologists don't seem to ever learn it is that every aspect of their presumed knowledge about things so complex as biology, in not only individuals, not only in a single species, but, in the enormously expansive presumption of making parallels, not only among species, not only among classes but right to the level of domains, their confident claims are absurd. Yet that is the common practice of such scientists, a habit that they can't be talked out of.
In a footnote in Richard Lewontin's introductory essay I quoted yesterday, he gave a quote from the physicist and atheist-materialist ideologue (and morally a spoiled 2-year-old) Steven Weinberg:
"We don't study elementary particles because they are intrinsically interesting, like people. They are not - if you've seen one electron, you have seen them all."
That observation by a man I have little respect for (see the links and you will see why) is something I can objectively cite to point out the problem with the biological habit of pretending the kinds of generalized statements you can make about elementary particles can be made about different species in biology, even remotely related species.
Organisms may be made of molecules and atoms but their complexity as entities to be studied renders the generalized assumptions that might legitimately be made about the behavior of atoms, molecules, subatomic entities, is certainly not transferable to organisms. Expecting to make such overarching generalizations such as the one in that passage from Medical daily, the kind that was introduced into biology largely through the adoption of natural selection as a main ideological feature, which has had the effect of controlling what we say and what we think we see in the study of life.
The validity of that assumption, when tested by observation among far more closely, though not that closely related, organisms, human beings and the mice and rats used in the presumed study of drugs on human beings, turns out to be not so valid. To make that assumption about such newly discovered and little understood and very complicated effects such as these instances of epigenetic inheritance seems to be, let me say, likely to be problematic. Yet assumptions of even greater presumption are typically made about organisms, known and entirely unknown, in the lost past of life on earth are the bread and butter of natural selection.
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But I'm a political blogger whose main motive is in the protection of egalitarian democracy and the biological basis of all of life and providing, universally a more decent, more peaceful, more materially and spiritually abundant life to all people and to care for all life on Earth, in so far as it is humanly possible.
Through looking at the terrible history of human beings and, especially, the terrible histories of the 20th and 21st centuries, I think that can only happen through a decidedly non-materialistic, non-scientistic, non-atheistic framing of the kind that Darwinism, natural selection is fatal to. I have noted that passage in which the American journalist Eric Alterman cites the historian James Kloppenberg and the eminent scholar Jurgen Habermas as well as one of the greatest presidents of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, in identifying the religious belief of Christianity as the source of American style liberalism. Habermas, in the most developed articulation of that idea - something much lied about and distorted by ideological atheists online - directly attributes it to the Jewish teaching of justice as extended through the Christian teaching of universal love. I have asked my fellow liberals, if they're right about that, why do they so love hatin' on Christianity and religion in general? The religion that demands that you treat the least among you as you would treat God, even as their hero Charles Darwin, gave his disciples scientifically claimed reasons for locally starving them out of existence, leaving them unvaccinated, untreated, when he wasn't enthusiastically saying that the British and other European imperial genocide of the "lower races" would lead to a glorious age of better human beings. And I have demonstrated in their own words they did say exactly those things in unambiguous terms. Look at my archive and follow up my citations of primary documents.
It is an incredible irony that there is a materially demonstrable proof of that in this relatively new discovery of epigentics in relation to what John Dominic Crossan, notes is one of the central concerns of the Gospel, and which Marilynne Robinson (among so many others) has noted is a central aspect of the Mosaic Law, the ample provision of food to the poor, the destitute, the needy. I am confident that if the study of epigenetic inheritance continues, it's quite possible that they will discover many other aspects of such provision to the least among us that has a decisive effect on the god of current atheist-secularist devotion their vulgar conception of "evolution" effects that the Darwinists, starting with Charles Darwin, himself, claimed that natural selection contra-indicated as good for the future of the species, something which directly generated eugenics, leading to social, political, legal and military policy that killed millions.
That could not be a more ironic effect as found within the history of science.
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