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Some 200 years after the French naturalist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829), came up with his theory of the Inheritance of acquired traits, or Lamarkism, which was, in due course, thoroughly rubbished in the West, by Darwinian Evolutionists, here's a BBC Horizon programme which suggests that geneticists have discovered a mechanism in DNA which will warm the hearts of Forteans everywhere.
Edit: Removed old reference to BBC Horizon programme in title. For clarification purposes.
Has one of the 'Holy Grails' of hardcore fluffy woo woo Forteanism been discovered? However they try to hide it, it would be a real brass knuckled punch in the face for orthodox science.BBC Online: Horizon
Thu 3 Nov, 9:00 pm - 9:50 pm 50mins
The Ghost In Your Genes
Horizon explores the ghost world in your genes - the hidden layer of inheritance that lies in every cell of our body. From IVF treatment, to post traumatic stress disorder, to the food our grandparents ate, the controversial science of epigenetics could change the way we think about inheritance forever.
At the heart of this new field is a simple but contentious idea - the idea that our genes have a 'memory'. That the lives of your grandparents - the air they breathed, the food they ate, even the things they saw - can directly affect you, decades later, despite never experiencing these things yourself. And that the things you do in your lifetime will in turn affect your grandchildren.
Epigenetics represents a major shift in thinking from the conventional view that DNA carries all our heritable information, and that nothing an individual does in their lifetime will be biologically passed to their children. It is a heresy to most scientists, calling into question the way we have viewed the DNA sequence - the very cornerstone on which modern biology sits.
But scientists have now found a whole new layer to our genes beyond the DNA. They have revealed how epigenetic 'switches' control the genes themselves, and that these switches can be turned on and off by environmental factors like nutrition and stress. It reports the startling first evidence that this can cause heritable effects in humans. [AD,S]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/horizon/
Edit: Removed old reference to BBC Horizon programme in title. For clarification purposes.