Stotz Karola, Griffiths Paul
Department of Philosophy, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia.
Department of Philosophy and Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, 2006, Australia.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 2016 Dec;38(4):22. doi: 10.1007/s40656-016-0121-2. Epub 2016 Nov 16.
Everyone has heard of 'epigenetics', but the term means different things to different researchers. Four important contemporary meanings are outlined in this paper. Epigenetics in its various senses has implications for development, heredity, and evolution, and also for medicine. Concerning development, it cements the vision of a reactive genome strongly coupled to its environment. Concerning heredity, both narrowly epigenetic and broader 'exogenetic' systems of inheritance play important roles in the construction of phenotypes. A thoroughly epigenetic model of development and evolution was Waddington's aim when he introduced the term 'epigenetics' in the 1940s, but it has taken the modern development of molecular epigenetics to realize this aim. In the final sections of the paper we briefly outline some further implications of epigenetics for medicine and for the nature/nurture debate.
每个人都听说过“表观遗传学”，但这个术语对不同的研究者来说含义不同。本文概述了当代的四种重要含义。表观遗传学在其各种意义上都对发育、遗传和进化有影响，对医学也有影响。关于发育，它强化了一个与环境紧密相连的反应性基因组的观点。关于遗传，狭义的表观遗传和更广泛的“外遗传”遗传系统在表型构建中都发挥着重要作用。20世纪40年代，沃丁顿在引入“表观遗传学”一词时，其目标是建立一个彻底的表观遗传发育与进化模型，但直到分子表观遗传学的现代发展才实现了这一目标。在本文的最后部分，我们简要概述了表观遗传学对医学以及先天/后天之争的一些进一步影响。
