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Comments

Merry

Hi, Paul,

It is very pleasing to hear that you (and perhaps others) think about items in our posts for days afterwords!

As to "epigenetics," I appreciate your point of view. That is why I did NOT use the term in the post itself, even though it was in the title of the featured paper. Perhaps the authors chose it to emphasize that the state is inherited and can be stable for many generations.

We may encounter more terminology issues similar to this in the future because "genetics" came to be gene focused, and any mechanism of inheritance other than or in addition to a nucleotide sequence is both suspect and in need of a term to classify it.

Lastly, your point about ways to "genetically program a discrete probability distribution" is an important one. Stochastic events meet natural selection.

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