How are giraffes relevant to research in the Marlin Lab? Why are they in our logo? We’re so glad you asked. By using parent and baby giraffes as our logo mark— making an “M” to represent Marlin— we acknowledge one of the first theories in biology on how traits are passed down through generations by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

If you have ever played the game of telephone, you already know how easy it is for whispered phrases to be completely changed by the time several people retell them. In a way, scientists play their own version of telephone. Instead of whispered phrases, scientists share and discuss ideas, posit new concepts, and debate findings. There’s maybe a no better example of this than our ideas around evolution and how information about the environment is inherited. Students around the world are taught that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the main opponent of Charles Darwin— both holding clashing hypotheses about evolution. However, as with other binary simplifications, this positioning as opposing theories misses a lot of important information.

Lamarck lived in a time where evolution — in the sense of species changing over time — was not widely accepted. Previously, naturalist George Cuvier had suggested that once a species appeared, it would remain immutable until its extinction.

Lamarck’s contributions to this nascent field came in the form of two laws:

1. How frequently an organ is used determines the size and strength of that organ in later generations

2. The environment produces biological changes that are preserved through generations

These two laws were not only accepted by Darwin but expanded upon in his own famous theories. Somewhere between the 1800s and now, Lamarck’s ideas were simplified, vilified, and mocked. This is where our giraffe friends first appear. The popularized version of Lamarck’s legacy became this: By stretching their necks to get at higher leaves, giraffes would pass down longer necks to their children, thus helping them adapt and survive.

In contrast, Darwin argued that only giraffes born with long necks live to pass down their genes, thus resulting in offspring with longer necks. But it’s often forgotten that it was Lamarck who first proposed that giraffes could pass down any information about the environment at all. He theorized that inherited information needed to be essential and functional, like “not enough food down here, must get higher leaves.” Darwin built on this by proposing that these essential and functional pieces of information are what natural selection acts on. Lamarck and Darwin’s theories worked together to dispel the opposing notion put forward by Cuvier, that a giraffe just showed up exactly as it is now and that it will remain as such until extinct. Lamarck’s ideas weren’t wrong; they were just vague. In our game of science telephone, when Lamarck took his turn, his whisper was too hard to decipher, and Darwin filled in the blanks.

So giraffes turn out to be a perfect animal to showcase the interface between what a parent can pass down to their offspring and how exactly the environment affects that inheritance. We now know that animals can transmit information through epigenetic changes. These changes happen through an animal’s experience, which in turn affects how DNA is interpreted, rather than changing its actual sequence.

Giraffes are not a common animal model in science. But for the field of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, giraffes represent a homage to Lamarck, who first envisioned that our experiences and environments could shape our offspring in a single generation. Epigenetic changes across generations are not only fascinating, but they also represent a mechanism of species adaptation that bypasses the longer timescales of natural selection. In a society where changes not only happen by the generations but by the day, studying and understanding these mechanisms is exciting and deeply necessary.

Written by: Thiago Arzua, PhD
Original logo designed by: Clara Liff