Even science’s deepest foundations can be questioned, and at times replaced, when they prove incompatible with current discoveries. Geneticists and evolutionary biologists had long assumed that genes were the sole molecular vehicles of inheritance. Offspring resemble their parents because they share the same DNA sequences in their genomes. But when genetic sequencing became inexpensive and new molecular biology techniques gave us ways to measure how genes were being activated, strong evidence began accumulating that this was not the full picture. In addition to passing their genes to their
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