Explain like I’m 5: Epigenetics

Does what you do while you’re alive influence your offspring? Depends…

Photo by Andrew S on Unsplash

A tale of two biologists

Imagine you’re a biologist in the year 1700. You see lots of animals in the world, many of them very different than other animals. There’s especially a good amount of variety among the animals in the human world, like domesticated dogs species and all their breeds.

You’re a biologist so you want to try and understand WHY they’re different, you study a bunch of animals (lets say dogs) and you come to some conclusions:

• Animals that exhibit certain behaviors/traits have offspring that also have similar behaviors/traits
• An animals skill and ability honed over the course of its life influences its offspring

Now imagine I take you, the year-1700 biologist, and ask you “why do giraffes have long necks?”

Your answer can basically come down to

• Long necked giraffes have long necked kids, if it’s something beneficial those kids will do better

OR

• Early giraffes who stretched their necks more had children with longer necks

These are basically the competing theories of evolution that monsieurs Darwin and Lamarck respectively came up with.