After the tragic events of September 11th 2001, Rachel Yehuda, a psychologist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, studied the effects of stress on a group of women who were inside or near the World Trade Center and were pregnant at the time. Produced in conjunction with Jonathan Seckl, an Edinburgh doctor, her results suggest that stress effects can pass down generations. Meanwhile research at Washington State University points to toxic effects – like exposure to fungicides or pesticides – causing biological changes in rats that persist for at least four generations.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist, soldier and biologist who is most well known for Lamarckian evolution, a 200-year old theory that has been largely dismissed. His theory suggested that acquired characteristics can be passed onto offspring e.g. as a giraffe reached for taller branches, their neck stretched, which made their offspring have a slightly longer necks. It is true giraffe's necks did not evolve this way, however, according to epigenetics, acquired information can be passed to the next generation. Not by the information encoded in the DNA, but instead, the molecules that are involved in decoding the DNA message. For example, chicken given an unpredictable food supply produced offspring that were better capable of such unpredictability.
