In a fundamental challenge to more than a century of Darwinian dominance, Chinese scientists have revived a long-dismissed evolutionary theory by proving that acquired traits can shape heredity – no DNA changes required.
According to a landmark study published in the esteemed scientific journal Cell, rice plants subjected to cold stress passed on an adaptive tolerance to low temperatures across five generations, bypassing the genetic mutations that are central to Darwinism.
The breakthrough reignites the 19th-century rivalry between French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck – whose “giraffe theory” proposed that organisms can pass on learned survival traits – and Charles Darwin’s ideas about random genetic variation.
The research not only mirrored Lamarck’s famed giraffe-neck parable, by pinpointing heritable DNA methylation changes as the driver of cold adaptation in crops, it also challenges modern biology to reconcile epigenetics with evolution’s core principles.
The team, led by researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, showed that rice varieties from China’s frosty northeast exhibited these stable, non-genetic adaptations – positioning Lamarckism as a potent, if partial, force in evolution’s playbook.
“We demonstrate that environmentally induced epigenetic variation contributes to the inheritance of an acquired characteristic,” the team said, in a paper published in the peer-reviewed life sciences journal on May 22.
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