"..... but like I said earlier ToE does not admit that the diet or any enviornmental variable can influence traits in offspring . Traits are dictated by genes and genes are closed off from the enviornment . This is the basic dogma of Weismann 's barrier ."
"Actually it is n't . No , really , it is n't ; I 'm not making this up ; I think you 've genuinely crossed a wire somewhere there . Traits are partially described by genes ; they 're the starting point - as you once put it , the 'hard drive ' - but the process of turning genes into an organism is unquestionably influenced by the environment - chemically , thermally etc etc . That 's one reason frogs need so damn many genes while placental animals can get away with a lot fewer : frogspawn have to tolerate such widely varying temperatures during development and need proteins that work correctly at all those temperatures , whereas mammalian foetuses develop in a chemically and thermally regulated environment . Weismann 's barrier says only that hereditary information moves from genes to body cells but never in reverse . The genes provide the starting point , the developmental process - modulated by environmental factors - turns that information into an organism , but there 's no feedback . Retroviruses might constitute a hole in that barrier , which opens up some interesting possibilities . Anyway , the point is , the ToE as it stands does not say , in any shape or form , that genes alone dictate traits and nothing else gets a look in . What it does say is that although the environment can modulate the eventual phenotype during development , it ca n't directly feed back the results of expressing those genes to the genotype . The environment can only have an indirect 'say ' in the genotype of organisms , by allowing some to flourish and inhibiting the success of others . That 's why , in the other thread where we 're discussing the butterflies , I describe the Darwinian process of arriving at environmental sensitivity in the way I do : the environment modulates the phenotype differently in the different seasons ( based on chemical or thermal variation ) and Natural Selection , in this case , is the organisms with genes that consistently yield the 'best ' phenotypes in that variable environment flourishing better . Simmer for a couple of million years and ... well , there you go ."
"but like I said earlier ToE does not admit that the diet or any enviornmental variable can influence traits in offspring ."
"Actually it is n't . No , really , it is n't"