Inheritance Radio Lab

The biggest question in psychology is what makes us who we are? Is it our nature, our genetic DNA that codes for every protein in our body, or is it our nurture, the environment that we live in. A common consensus among psychologists is that nature plays on nurture. In other words, there is an important interaction between the two factors that make us who we are. But now the question becomes, how does our inherited genetic code inside the nucleus of our cells interact with the environment in which we live? In the study discussed in this radio lab, it was discovered that rats that are licked as pups by their mothers lick their own pups. However, rats that were not licked as pups did not lick their own pups. It was concluded that when the mother licked its pup, her tongue aroused the pup and through a series of events, changed the pup's epigenome. In this case, the environment actually caused a change in the pups DNA and it began to lick its pups because of new proteins its DNA produced after it was licked. The idea that the environment can really change people is incredibly interesting. Here are some extras on epigenetics:

In 2010 Time published an article titles "Why Genes Aren't Destiny" as a cover story:
http://www.soulmedicineinstitute.org/TimeMag.pdf

This explains the epigenome in less than 2 minutes!

The Epigenome and Identical Twins