The principle is you just need those three things variation, selection and heredity.

Folk ideas about heredity are a particularly powerful cultural tool, but they are not unique to pre modern societies. Even contemporary science has its own cultural ideologies about heredity, which are often difficult to disentangle from the complex data and high technology that we believe produces objective, value free glimpses of nature.

Harkening back to Susan Blackmore's talk, we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection, and we know where that leads.

The Convention broadly defines genetic material as any material of plant, animal, microbial or other origin containing functional units of heredity and genetic resources as genetic material of actual or potential value (art. 2).

For example, a representative of the Committee took part in the first meeting of the WHO Expert Committee on Radiation (Effects of Radiation on Human Heredity), which was held at Geneva from 28 July to 2 August 1958.

Within the genetic code, there are 30,000 40,000 highly organized regions called genes. Genes are the basic unit of heredity, and, unless you are an identical twin, the combination of genes inherited from your parents is unique to you.

For the last 70 years, the dominant paradigm in evolutionary science has been the so called new synthesis. Widely publicized in recent years by Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the new synthesis unites Darwin s theory of natural selection with Mendelian genetics, which explains heredity.

We make sense of the world, and of our place in it, culturally and science provides more information for constructing that place. But like any other peoples, our own application of that information to the puzzle of our existence is strongly influenced by our non scientific ideas, our pervasive folk ideologies of heredity.

Darwin believed that present day organisms are descendants of much simpler ancestors they are the products of unbroken lines of heredity that stretch back to the origin of life. Today, we have a mass of evidence, ranging from studies of ancient fossils to the latest discoveries of molecular biology, that supports this theory.amp 160

In 1936, the Nobel laureate Max Planck observed that scientific innovations rarely spread as a result of their opponents conversion instead, opponents of innovation gradually die out, and the next generation accepts the breakthrough. This was the case with vaccinations and the recognition that DNA is the stuff of heredity and it will happen eventually with genetic engineering.

For example, we know that some environmental insults and stresses, such as temporary starvation, can affect future generations. In evolutionary studies, because heritable non genetic variations are often induced by the environment, we have to expand our notion of heredity and variation to include the inheritance of acquired variations, the once disparaged idea that was part of Lamarck s theory.

The nineteenth century philosopher John Stuart Mill was of the anyone can do it school. He was convinced that his achievements were in no way due to superior heredity anyone of normal intelligence and health, subjected to his father s educational system which included learning Greek at the age of three could have become John Stuart Mill.