Charles Darwin was wrong? (AprIl 2022)

Richard and Marilyn discuss the use of EMDR to change generational characteristics that affect their clients today.

Before Darwin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French natural history scholar, proposed that characteristics acquired by experience during an organism’s lifetime could become heritable.

Was Charles Darwin wrong?

This is contrary to ’natural selection’ the currently accepted explanation first formulated by Darwin and supported by modern genetics. Natural selection holds that heritable characteristics arise by chance and are retained if competition shows them to be useful. The conventional objection to Lamarck’s proposal is that it would require the recipe for such environmentally induced changes to be accurately written into the organism’s DNA. While occasional examples of short-term effects that resemble such inheritable experiences do occur, such as responses to events like famine, they persist for only a generation or so. They are known as epigenetic effects.

The Economist*reported new research that demonstrates Lamarck’s idea is actually possible, at least for a species of worm, in which a specific life-saving behaviour is actually encoded in a relative of DNA called RNA; and is passed down to the third and fourth generations.  

Dr Murphy, of Princeton University worked with a nematode worm often used in genetic studies. The nematode lives in rotting fruit and eats bacteria.  One such bacteria is dangerous to the worm if the temperature rises above 25 degrees centigrade. Worms that survive such an encounter, unsurprisingly, are put off by the experience and avoid this species of bacteria.

This is what one would expect of surviving worms, but Dr Murphy wondered if such avoidant behaviour might be displayed by the offspring of those worms.  It was. And by the offspring of those offspring.  In fact, it did not disappear until the fifth generation of worms descended from the ones which had had the bad experience.  Further work by members of Dr Murphy’s team showed that the switch from attraction to repulsion was due to an increase in the amount of protein in a pair of nerve cells found near the worm’s mouth, and they remained elevated for a further four generations before returning to normal in the fifth.  

Why the effect persists for four generations and no further is unknown.  But what the research shows is that a specific acquired characteristic that proves useful can indeed, be inherited.

Interestingly, Lamarck’s idea is certainly entertained within EMDR circles.  Various examples of how the EMDR process can be adapted to effect change in inherited characteristics can be found in the literature*.    

*EMDR Solutions, Pathways to Healing; Robin Shapiro, Editor, 2005. Norton & Company, New York

*The Economist, February 26 2022

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