• Question: can physical features be past down through genes e.g working out at the gym everyday all your life will some of that strength or maybe if a person starts dancing or doing parkour will the offspring inherite any of these abilities??

    Asked by imagineozzi to Anna, Chris, Jane, Iain, Nick on 11 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Anna Middleton

      Anna Middleton answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      @imagineozzi extreme things that happen to people in life, e.g. starvation, can have in imprint on your genes and this can been passed on (if you are interested, read up about ‘epigenetics’). Phsical characteristics also do run in families, e.g. a tendency to have black hair and brown eyes. But if you work out at the gym everyday the person this will have the most impact on is you, not your kids

    • Photo: Iain Moal

      Iain Moal answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      This is an excellent question. The short answer is no. This is because evolution is Darwinian, not Lamarkian. In Lamarkian evolution, the things you do in your life time can be passed down. The classic example that used to be used was the giraffe – during a giraffes life time, it keeps stretching to eat the highest leaves. Some people used to believe that this experience was passed down to the giraffes children. However, we now know this to be wrong. Instead, evolution is Darwinian, which means that in any given generation, some giraffes will have slightly longer necks than others, just by random variation. It is these giraffes that can eat more, and ultimately have more children, which inherit the long necks that the parent was born to have, and that is how giraffes ended up having longer necks.

    • Photo: Chris Cole

      Chris Cole answered on 11 Mar 2014:

      A long time ago a scientist tested this out by chopping off the tails of mice (or maybe it was rats) and see if their offspring were born with no tails. He tried this many, many times, but it never made any difference – the mice were always born with tails. The same is true of going to the gym.

      Like Anna points out there are some examples where some traits can be passed from mother to child, via epigenetics, but they are not the dominant way for ‘abilities’ to passed down the generations.

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