The birth of a website

We were at sea, crewing on a friend’s yacht; discussing politics, books, art and science as we used to do years ago when we were regular diving partners. And at some point the environment came up, and health; climate change, and Damien’s anecdotes of changes he’s seen in populations of antarctic animals. Soon, we discovered overlaps in our long held interests, finding ourselves talking about interactions between environment and fauna, animal behaviour and instinct, atavism and disease, and emerging changes in evolutionary and genetic sciences. Much of this reduced to two primary themes: the possibility of inheritance of life experience, and sources of variation in form and function alternative to random mutations. We saw an opportunity to look into how the rapid and striking changes recently taking place in genetics and evolutionary biology might now support or oppose ideas that interested us but had long been contentious or contrary to scientific knowledge. In doing so, there was the possibility of creating a description of the exciting developments in these fields that was accessible to non-specialists. We hope this website fulfils that aim.