Lamarck My Words...
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829) was a pioneer in the science of evolution—long before Darwin and Wallace had their say about the subject. He had this lovely idea that, like our “hardware” (our physical traits), we inherit our “software” (our acquired traits; ideas and emotions) from our ancestors. This was long before we had genetics as a research tool, so he never found the mechanism for that inheritance. Modern geneticists have long discredited his charming notion.
Until now.
Like Alfred Wegener’s theory of Continental Drift, serious scientists wrote off Lamarck’s theory of acquired traits as idle speculation. Then, in the 1960s, evidence (gained through studying the mid-Atlantic ridge on the ocean floor) revealed the mechanism that proved that Wegener had been right. Now, in the twenty-first century, we are learning that Lamarck’s eighteenth-century notion also has some validity (despite having wrong ideas about the mechanism involved).
Here’s what changed (as far as Lamarckism is concerned).
Researchers trained lab mice, using aversion techniques, to fear a particular stimulus. They repeatedly exposed the mice to that stimulus until they instantly recoiled in terror whenever they experienced it. Then the researchers bred several generations of those mice without ever exposing them to the stimulus—so none of them could possibly associate it with subsequent adverse effects. Then they exposed, for the first time, that stimulus to a great-great-grandchild of the original mouse.
It recoiled in horror. Somehow, that mouse had inherited the fear that its ancestor experienced. A paper published in Nature, in 2021 (“The memory of neuronal mitochondrial stress is inherited transgenerationally via elevated mitochondrial DNA levels”) revealed the missing mechanism.
Why am I boring you with arcane facts from the history of science?
Because I woke up this morning thinking about one of my grandfathers. He was born—in 1882, in the US—to Danish immigrants. He died some seventy years ago, when I was not quite ten years old. I have only one memory of him (which is shared below). What I have learned, over the years—filling in more about him—comes from family stories and genealogical research.
Apparently, I have much in common with him—things I could not have learned by observing through my child’s eyes. Somewhere, lurking in my mitochondria, my grandfather lives on.
He was (as I am)—to put a more positive spin on it—a “reserved,” or “taciturn” fellow. “Aloof,” “unfeeling,” “cold,” “distant,” are adjectives that others might use (and have used) to describe us. I chalk that up to our Danish genes. After all, the Danes gave us Prince Hamlet and Soren Kierkegaard (i.e., not the sort of people one chooses to invite to a party).
I do share certain physical traits. I have his blue eyes, long nose, and gray thinning hair. I am, as he was, tall and fairly slender—but I’m more interested in acquired traits.
For example, I’ve been told that, like him, I often walk around with my hands stuck into my back pockets. I never saw him do that.
The only photo I have of him shows him—standing in his garden—wearing a cap exactly like the ones I wear. I never saw him, in life, with a cap, but it has always felt right to wear one like it. I have many photos and drawings of me, almost always wearing those caps, spread over the last six decades.
Like him, I prefer to do things myself, from scratch—and don’t like quitting until they’re done.
For example, he grated his own horseradish with a hand-cranked grinder. He first sealed the kitchen door with towels to keep the tear-gas-like fumes from spreading to the rest of the house. He then worked doggedly—all by himself—with a flood of tears rolling down his hoary cheeks, and kept at it until the job was done.
I, too, have grated my own horseradish (but using a blender) and can vouch for the wisdom of his technique. Alas, those damned mitochondria let me down. A Lamarckian acquired trait that might have spared me an excruciating experience failed to kick in when I needed it most.
You, however, have a chance to acquire a trait from my experience: never sniff horseradish while it’s being grated.
Not Eggs Ackley
When I was a child, I developed a loathing for eggs. Sometimes, when I was ill, my mother would stir an egg into my milk, sweeten it, and try to convince me that it was a kind of milkshake. Invariably, a quivering piece of raw egg-white—something like a boiled booger, cooled and congealed—would lie stranded on my tongue.
Even now, I shudder in remembered disgust.
I could be induced to try a little scrambled egg (if very dry) or a hard-boiled egg (if very cold, and with its shell dyed in the gaudiest Easter-egg colors that modern chemistry could provide), but the very idea of slurping down runny yolks—reeking sulfuriously in their fluorescent yellow nastiness—was the stuff of nightmares.
Just sitting at the breakfast table when my father cut into his sunnyside-ups was an unbearable ordeal. I could turn away, of course, but that eggy smell soon overcame my pitiful attempts at table manners—and there was no way to hide the kicking-in of the gag reflex. I was certain that there was nothing worse that could happen at breakfast.
I was wrong.
One morning, I woke to find that my grandfather had spent the night at our house. He was a silent gray figure, as grizzled and uncuddly as the generations of taciturn Danes that preceded him. He sat—hunched slightly forward—at the breakfast table, looking down at his glass of milk. He remained silent as I sat across from him. He lifted the glass, and slowly—in one long draft—drank the whole thing. It was only at the end, when the cloudy glass was nearly empty, that I saw it.
A raw egg had been lying, hidden like some foul serpent, at the bottom of his glass. Slowly, oh how horribly slowly, the slimy thing slid down the milky film and into his mouth.
Sixty years later, I have become as gray and grizzled and uncuddly as my grandfather was then—but no power on earth could make me swallow one of those milky raw eggs.
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Interesting