<P> In October 2010, further evidence linking food intake to traits inherited by the offspring were shown in a study of rats conducted by several Australian universities . The study strongly suggested that fathers can transfer a propensity for obesity to their daughters as a result of the fathers' food intake, and not their genetics (or specific genes), prior to the conception of the daughter . A "paternal high - fat diet" was shown to cause cell dysfunction in the daughter, which in turn led to obesity for the daughter . Felicia Nowak, et al. reported at the Endocrine Society meeting in June 2013 that obese male rats passed on the tendency to obesity to their male offspring . </P> <P> Several studies, one conducted by researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and another by researchers at the Tufts University School of Medicine, have rekindled the debate once again . As reported in MIT Technology Review in February 2009, "The effects of an animal's environment during adolescence can be passed down to future offspring...The findings provide support for a 200 - year - old theory of evolution that has been largely dismissed: Lamarckian evolution, which states that acquired characteristics can be passed on to offspring ." A report investigating the inheritance of resistance to viral infection in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans suggests that small RNA molecules may be inherited in a non-Mendelian fashion and provide resistance to infection . More recent studies in C. elegans have revealed that progeny may inherit information regarding environmental challenges that the parent experienced, such as starvation, and that this epigenetic effect may persist for multiple generations . </P> <P> A study (Akimoto et al. 2007) on epigenetic inheritance in rice plants came to the conclusion that "gene expression is flexibly tuned by methylation, allowing plants to gain or lose particular traits which are heritable as far as methylation patterns of corresponding genes are maintained . This is in support of the concept of Lamarckian inheritance, suggesting that acquired traits are heritable ." Another study (Sano, 2010) wrote that observations suggest that acquired traits are heritable in plants as far as the acquired methylation pattern is stably transmitted which is consistent with Lamarckian evolution . Handel and Ramagopalan found that there is evidence that epigenetic alterations such as DNA methylation and histone modifications are transmitted transgenerationally as a mechanism for environmental influences to be passed from parents to offspring . According to Handel and Romagopalan "epigenetics allows the peaceful co-existence of Darwinian and Lamarckian evolution ." </P> <P> In their book An Introduction to Zoology (2013), Joseph Springer and Dennis Holley wrote: </P>

Those who argue today that behavior is no more than the action of chemicals