In a recent story, I looked at geneticist Richard C. Lewontin’s famous 1997 essay in The New York Review of Books. There he made clear that science is to be understood as an instrument of materialism: “It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated.”
Does that level of dogmatic certainty produce a reliably clear picture of nature? In the NYRB essay, Lewontin mentions a controversy in evolution: Can life forms acquire characteristics during their lifespan that they pass on to their offspring?
He was quite certain that the answer is no:
But no serious student of epistemology any longer takes the naive view of science as a process of Baconian induction from theoretically unorganized observations. There can be no observations without an immense apparatus of preexisting theory. Before sense experiences become “observations” we need a theoretical question, and what counts as a relevant observation depends upon a theoretical frame into which it is to be placed. Repeatable observations that do not fit into an existing frame have a way of disappearing from view, and the experiments that produced them are not revisited. In the 1930s well-established and respectable geneticists described “dauer-modifications,” environmentally induced changes in organisms that were passed on to offspring and only slowly disappeared in succeeding generations. As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decommissioned facts.
“Billions and Billions of Demons,” January 9, 1997
Now, the prose is a bit dense, but by “dauer-modifications,” Lewontin is referring to “an acquired character transmitted through the cytoplasm to several succeeding generations but not incorporated into the permanent heredity of the strain” (Merriam–Webster). Today, that’s generally called epigenetic change.
Notice how Lewontin — guardian of science as interpreted through materialism — handled the question: “As the science of genetics hardened, with its definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, observations of dauer-modifications were sent to the scrapheap where they still lie, jumbled together with other decommissioned facts.”
It seems that materialism, at least in Lewontin’s day, could simply decommission a whole set of observations that did not accord with the hardening dogma of a science, in this case, genetics.
Fast Forward Nearly Thirty Years
Whether hard-core materialism is loosening its hold on science or for other reasons, the topic of epigenetics is being treated very differently today.
At The Scientist, science writer and virologist Kamal Nahas reports,“Scientists once dismissed the theory that traits acquired during life could be inherited, but with new evidence and hypotheses, it’s seeing a resurgence.”
Now, scientists are exploring how organisms can pass on epigenetic traits, which are features that contribute to an individual’s phenotype without altering the underlying gene sequence. Epigenetic changes include methyl groups tagged onto DNA, modifications to the histones that wrap DNA, and the breakdown of mRNA transcripts to silence genes. Though scientists have yet to unravel the precise mechanisms behind epigenetic inheritance, recent evidence reveals noncoding RNA could be pivotal to passing on acquired traits, and a novel hypothesis suggests epigenetic markers in sex stem cells may also play a role.
“Was Lamarck Right? Reviving a Dead Theory of Evolution,” August 11, 2025
And why was Lewontin so sure that epigenetics belongs on the scrapheap?
As scientists began to unravel how genes control inheritance, they discovered that genetics controls heredity for the most part. Evidence for Lamarckism, on the other hand, was absent. However, scientists lacked a framework to test Lamarckism because, with cell biology in its infancy, they couldn’t propose a mechanism for how acquired traits might pass on. Instead, they hastily ruled out the inheritance of acquired traits based on a handful of experiments: German scientist August Weismann cut off the tails of mice to see if they would pass on their injury to their pups, but they did not.7 Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton, transfused blood between rabbits with different coat colors to see if the recipients’ kittens would inherit the donors’ coat color, but the experiment similarly failed.8 Arshak Alexanian, an epigenetics researcher at the Medical College of Wisconsin, considered these to be “very primitive experiments” that could not be used to dismiss Lamarckism. A common logical fallacy is to mistake an absence of evidence for a hypothesis as evidence for its absence, yet scientists used these scant experiments to rule out the inheritance of acquired traits. “At that time, nothing was known about gene regulation and epigenetics, yet they made such a conclusion. And unfortunately, it became dogma,” Alexanian said.
“Dead Theory”
In short, Lewontin’s dogmatic commitment to materialism seems to have functioned as a reinforcer of dogmatism in general. Epigenetics is probably not immaterial, of course; it is a natural process like many others. But somehow, when dogmatism seemed to be a virtue, the very idea of its existence got in the way of the “definitive rejection of any possibility of the inheritance of acquired characteristics” — and the rest is history. Not an inspiring history. Rather, one that should serve as a warning.
And the State of Play Today?
Noncoding RNA molecules are considered epigenetic regulators because they can interfere with gene expression without disrupting DNA sequences.10 Some complement mRNA gene transcripts and pair with them, creating double-stranded RNA complexes that the cell breaks down, preventing ribosomes from using the mRNA to make protein. Others latch onto mRNA to block splicing, the process by which noncoding introns are removed before the mRNA is translated into protein. RNAs can also modify methylation tags on DNA by interacting with methylase enzymes, which can affect how transcription enzymes and histones bind to the gene.11
Given that noncoding RNAs can lead to epigenetic changes in multiple ways, scientists think they could potentially be heritable epigenetic regulators. So far, researchers have demonstrated that these RNAs can travel to sex organs from other body tissues, much like the hypothetical gemmules and plastidules that Darwin and Haeckel proposed. By injecting Green Fluorescent Protein-tagged RNA into the mouse bloodstream, scientists could trace the molecules to sperm cells.12 Next, scientists will need to prove whether these RNAs are heritable and pass down to offspring.
“Dead Theory”
The dogmatic mindset is bad for science overall. The fact that the dogma is materialism may make it worse. It certainly does not mitigate the damage that the tendency does in any way.
Cross-posted at Mind Matters News.