The food preferences of different groups of orcas are thought to be driving them to split into several different species. Photo by Mike Korostelev/Get

Science in flux: is a revolution brewing in evolutionary theory? | Aeon Essays

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2021-06-06 11:00:05

The food preferences of different groups of orcas are thought to be driving them to split into several different species. Photo by Mike Korostelev/Getty

The food preferences of different groups of orcas are thought to be driving them to split into several different species. Photo by Mike Korostelev/Getty

The food preferences of different groups of orcas are thought to be driving them to split into several different species. Photo by Mike Korostelev/Getty

is professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a fellow of the Society of Biology. His latest book, co-authored with Tobias Uller, is Evolutionary Causation: Biological and Philosophical Reflections (2019).

When researchers at Emory University in Atlanta trained mice to fear the smell of almonds (by pairing it with electric shocks), they found, to their consternation, that both the children and grandchildren of these mice were spontaneously afraid of the same smell. That is not supposed to happen. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible. A mouse should not be born with something its parents have learned during their lifetimes, any more than a mouse that loses its tail in an accident should give birth to tailless mice.

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