Parents influence the development of their offspring in many ways beyond the transmission of DNA. This includes transfer of epigenetic states, nutrients, antibodies and hormones, and behavioural interactions after birth. While the evolutionary consequences of such non-genetic inheritance are increasingly well understood, less is known about how inheritance mechanisms evolve. Here, we present a ...

In their Opinion Adrian-Kalchhauser et al. [ 1. I. Understanding ‘Non-genetic’ inheritance: insights from molecular-evolutionary crosstalk. Trends Ecol. Evol. 2020; 35: 1078-1089 Abstract Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (6) Google Scholar ] discussed the diverse molecular mechanisms underlying certain forms of nongenetic inheritance (see Box 1 for terminology). They proposed embracing these under u...

Inheritance-the influence of ancestors on the phenotypes of their descendants-translates natural selection into evolutionary change. For the past century, inheritance has been conceptualized almost exclusively as the transmission of DNA sequence variation from parents to offspring in accordance with Mendelian rules, but advances in cell and developmental biology have now revealed a rich array o...