LAMARCK AND 'A PERFECTING TENDENCY.'

Perfecting Kant's highest good

Epigenetics, Darwin, and Lamarck

It is not really helpful to consider modern environmental epigenetics as neo-Lamarckian; and there is no evidence that Lamarck considered the idea original to himself. We must all keep learning about inheritance, but attributing modern ideas to early researchers is not helpful, and can be misleading.

Perfecting peptide priming

Tumors can avoid immune destruction despite being invaded by tumor-specific CD8 ϩ T cells. On page 1257, Bronte et al. describe one way that prostate tumors subdue T cells— they make two enzymes that combine forces to cripple T cell signaling components. Tumors use a variety of tactics to avoid attack by cytotoxic CD8 ϩ T cells; one is to establish an inhospitable environment that inhibits T ce...

The return of Lamarck?

In the last decade researchers have produced immense amounts of genetic data resulting in many sequenced genomes. Although we may now know the DNA sequence in a genome, just as seeing all the letters of a book, deciphering which sequences encode genes, let alone understanding which combination of genes are required to organize life, is like decoding the meaning of a book written in a language n...

Calorie Restriction à Lamarck

Epigenetic inheritance of resistance to exogenous nucleic acids via small interfering (si) RNA is well established in animal models. Rechavi et al. demonstrate epigenetic inheritance of a starvation-induced pattern of gene silencing caused by endogenous siRNAs and resulting in an increased longevity in the third generation progeny. Combined with recent findings in prokaryotes, these results sug...