Since the early 2000s, when the human genome was fully mapped for the first time, the study of genetics and epigenetics has become one of the fastest growing and important areas of knowledge, of ourselves and our fellow creatures.
Religious and other theories have proliferated down the millenia to account for the ”unaccountable”. Ideas of God have mutated to basically attibute to God what was unknown to mankind at the time, an idea some call "the god of the gaps” (in our understanding). Variations on the theory of karma and reincarnation by the Vedanta school and other Hindustani beliefs were attempts at explaining ”psychology”, behaviour and character.
Religious and other theories have proliferated down the millenia to account for the ”unaccountable”. Ideas of God have mutated to basically attibute to God what was unknown to mankind at the time, an idea some call "the god of the gaps” (in our understanding). Variations on the theory of karma and reincarnation by the Vedanta school and other Hindustani beliefs were attempts at explaining ”psychology”, behaviour and character.
Scientists have long assumed that memories and learned experiences built up during a lifetime must be passed on by teaching later generations or through personal experience.
However, new research has shown that it is possible for some information to be inherited biologically through chemical changes that occur in DNA.
Researchers at the Emory University School of Medicine, in Atlanta, found that mice can pass on learned information about traumatic or stressful experiences – in this case a fear of the smell of cherry blossom – to subsequent generations.
More at Phobias may be memories passed down in genes from ancestors