It’s easy. If it uses the word “Lamarckian” without boldly prefixing it with “not“, you can just stop reading. Likewise if the word is prefixed with “pseudo-“, “semi-“, or “quasi-“. Just skip it. It’s too confused to bother with.
Epigenetics is in the news again, and in fact, it’s newsworthiness seems to be rising at a fantastic rate. Eight years ago, would you believe, I wrote a short summary of what epigenetics is, driven largely by the fact that a lot of people were writing about epigenetics without acknowledging that it was a grab-bag of mundane regulatory processes. It’s gotten worse. I had to explain the obvious: epigenetics ain’t magic. I tried to explain it last year again, that people have a lot of misconceptions about epigenetics. It’s frustrating because epigenetics encompasses a lot of cool and important stuff — genetic switches and gene regulation and plasticity and environmental responsiveness — but all the popular press wants to talk about is this weird idea that it’s a way break the tyranny of genetics and evolution and modify your genes for future generations, which is just plain wrong.
What it tells me is that there is still a lot of uneasiness about the implications of evolutionary theory. Not among most evolutionary biologists, of course, but in the general population. They wish for a way to believe that their progeny (and themselves) can be enhanced by an act of will, and they think that a poorly understood phenomenon like epigenetics provides a loophole. The whole idea that evolution is a statistical property of populations rather than something they can game to their advantage as individuals leaves them queasy. So they noodle around with the idea that somehow, by practice, they can change their whole genetic legacy using the buzzword “epigenetics”, not even realizing that epigenetic phenomena are a consequence of the properties of proteins, coded by genes, and regulatory sequences imbedded in their DNA, and that even short term cytoplasmic responses in the cell are ultimately derived from information in their genome.
People who use epigenetics as something that is anti-evolutionary remind me of Perry Marshall, the creationist who thinks Barbara McClintock’s work rebuts Darwinism, because he wrongly thinks somehow that it refutes the role of chance in evolution. They hate the whole idea of chance-driven processes, and want a way to shape genetics by an act of will, instead. It’s painful to see the contortions they put themselves through to run away from the implications of evolution and genetics.