Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection lacked valid hypotheses on the nature and mechanism of inheritance as well as on the origin and preservation of biological variation.

Now that genetic inheritance is featuring more and more as an explanation of disease and human behaviour in general, a question that needs to be asked is how such explanations affect people's ...

Genetics is fiendishly complex. We know this from decades of molecular biology, from the resulting studies on the sequencing and analysis of genomes and from our increasing knowledge of how genes ...

Gregor Mendel discovered the basic principles of heredity through experiments with pea plants, long before the discovery of DNA and genes. Mendel was an Augustinian monk at St Thomas’s Abbey near ...

The concept of epigenetic inheritance has long been controversial. Some researchers hope that new data on cross-generational effects of environmental exposures will help settle the debate. Andrea ...