New research shows how a father's experience can be passed on to his offspring.
How sperm remember | Newsroom - McGill University
This is the sort of paper that Creationist frauds can use to fool their scientifically illiterate dupes. It will be presented as 'proof' that Darwin was wrong all along and his 'rival' Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was right.
Lamarck, in his attempt to explain inheritance and evolution, had proposed that traits acquired after conception could be passed to children. He famously claimed a blacksmith, by developing string arms, would have sons who also had strong arms and be good blacksmiths. (In a sense, he was right but the mechanism, at least in sentient species, is via memes, not some assumed physical factor (genes were not know about then)). He was of course wrong about giraffes getting longer necks by stretching to reach higher leaves and passing on the stretched neck to their offspring. There is no way an acacia tree can stretch to avoid its leaves being eaten by giraffes, so Lamarckian inheritance can't explain arms races of that sort, even
if it had some basis.
Darwin, on the other hand, argued that it was traits inherited from parents that were passed on and that these were fixed at conception (with occasional variations which could be 'favoured' by the environment in 'natural selection').
However, in recent years the science of epigenetics has thrown up a few challenges to the idea of a purely Darwinian inheritance . Basically, epigenetics is the study of how genes are deactivated in specialised cells so that the cell only performs the specific punction of its speciality. As I'll explain later, epigenetics, far from being the gift creationists have been praying for which is going to refute the hated Darwinian mechanism of evolution by natural selection, but it represents a major challenge to the neo-Creationist invention, intelligent [sic] design.
Creationist thinking is often simplistic and binary so, for example, if Lamarck was a little bit right, he was entirely right and Darwin was completely wrong. As this paper shows, and as always with biology, the truth is much more nuanced than that, which is partly why creationists have difficulty with the subject.
But first this piece of research by scientists at McGill University, Montreal, Canada, led by Sarah Kimmins, PhD, of McGill's Faculty of Medicine, Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. As the
McGill news release explains: