Can Your Lifestyle Be Passed on to Future Generations?
CrowdScience
BBC
4.8 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2017
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Back when Charles Darwin presented his theory of evolution by natural selection, French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested something different - that the changes you are exposed to during your lifetime can be passed on to future generations. By this theory, giraffes have long necks because, over generations, they have stretched them, reaching for leaves.
This theory became laughable when genes were discovered as the means of heredity. Lifestyle choices cannot be passed down in your DNA, or so we thought….But recently this idea has returned and a new field of biology has emerged called epigenetics – which looks at how the genes we inherit from our parents are controlled and modified by their life experience and the choices they made.
Marnie Chesterton meets the survivors of the Dutch Famine of World War Two, whose grandchildren show health effects from that event despite being born three generations after the starvation of 1944.
As the new field of epigenetics develops, does this mean Lamarck was right all along? Can your lifestyle be passed on to future generations and does this mean we need to rethink our traditional view of evolution?
Do you have a question we can turn into a programme? Email us at crowdscience@bbc.co.uk
Presented and Produced by Marnie Chesterton
(Image: Grandmother, Mother and Daughter in a kitchen. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and maybe it's when I had a hand in. |
| 0:04.0 | I'm Tammy Walker and I produce podcasts for the BBC. |
| 0:08.0 | My role is to give new and diverse creators a voice with the opportunity to build a career. |
| 0:12.0 | That's the thing I love about podcasts. |
| 0:14.4 | You start with just a good idea, but then you have the space to see where it goes. |
| 0:18.4 | And doing that at the BBC means we can really run with the best stories |
| 0:21.9 | while developing the most unique audio talent. |
| 0:24.3 | So if you like what you hear, why not check out the huge range of podcast we've got on BBC |
| 0:29.1 | Sounds. You are listening to Crowd Science, the show that travels the world to find answers to your science queries. I'm Marnie Chesterton. This week I want to tell you a story about our genes, the nature of evolution, and an idea that biologists have been arguing about for decades, if not centuries. |
| 0:54.0 | Back in 1859, Charles Darwin published a book, |
| 0:59.0 | on the origin of species. |
| 1:00.0 | In it, he set out the basis of evolution by natural selection. |
| 1:05.0 | This idea is that every species on Earth evolves because there are randomly occurring variations within populations, |
| 1:12.0 | and some of these offer a better chance of survival. |
| 1:14.7 | It's a harsh old world and you only get to pass on your particular variations |
| 1:19.6 | if you live long enough to reproduce. A key point is that it's random and in your DNA. |
| 1:27.0 | The code you pass on is unaffected by what happens during your life? Or is it? DNA has its own instructions called the |
| 1:36.6 | epigenome which tell genes how to behave. That can be affected by our |
| 1:42.1 | environment. |
| 1:43.0 | So does it offer a new model of evolution |
| 1:46.4 | want as a crowd science listener? |
| 1:48.4 | Hello crowd science. |
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