Environmental Memory in Heredity: How Rice Learns Cold Tolerance through Epigenetics

Since Charles Darwin proposed the concept of natural selection, biological change has generally been understood as a process driven by genetic mutation and inheritance. Yet more than half a century before Darwin, the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed a different possibility: environmental changes might directly influence an organism's traits and even allow those traits to be passed to the next generation. For a long time this idea, often summarized as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, was widely dismissed as scientifically implausible.

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