The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is heritable, about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable.

So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable.

And one that is not heritable because who would want to pass on to their children the archaic enhancement modules that they got 25 years earlier from their parents?

To flesh out Darwinism, we obviously have to understand the three processes that are at its core. We need to know how organisms develop and reproduce, what is inherited and how it is inherited, and how heritable variations are generated.

For example, epigenetics the study of heritable modifications of the genome that do not involve alterations to the genetic code is on the rise. And the many kinds of small RNA molecules are increasingly recognized as forming a regulatory layer above the genome.

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 cellular changes that determine heritable genetic defects and which are also thought to be important in cancer induction are related to the alteration and loss of genetic information by damage to the deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in human cells by radiation. The Committee is therefore studying those mechanisms by reviewing developments from experiments that apply the techniques of molecular biology.