A growing body of evidence indicates that epigenetic states can be influenced by the environment. For example, prolonged cold-temperature treatments in plants can lead to both chromatin37 and DNA methylation changes at specific genomic loci38. Treatment with DNA damaging agents that are used in traditional chemical mutagenesis protocols can also change epigenetic states39, 40, 41. Indeed, some of the best-studied inherited epialleles in plants were derived originally from chemical mutagenesis experiments42, 43.
If I try to put this into more general (layman?) terminology, is it fair to say that:
- Environment during development plus genotype produces a phenotype,
- The same genotype in a different environment could produce a different phenotype (depending on what is affecting the development of the organisms),
- Natural selection operates on the phenotype,
- Thus the effect of the environment on the phenotype can be selected and inherited as long as the population stays in that environment?
Can these phenotype changes not due to genotype become fixed in a population?
Would you still class this as hereditary traits (as in "evolution is the change in hereditary traits in populations from generation to generation") or do we need some new terminology?
Should we distinguish this as a different\another kind of evolution?
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