Contrary to inheritance laws the scientific world has accepted for more than 100 years, some plants revert to normal traits carried by their grandparents, bypassing genetic abnormalities carried by both parents. "If you take this mutant Arabidopsis, which has two copies of the altered gene, let it seed and then plant the seeds, 90 percent of the offspring will look like the parent, but 10 percent will look like the normal grandparents," Pruitt said. "Our genetic training tells us that's just not possible. This challenges everything we believe. "We've done a lot of experiments, described in this paper, that show none of the simple explanations account for this skipping of generations by an inherited trait." Once scientists understand more about the mechanism, they then may be able to manipulate it to modify genes already in plants and animals in order to correct mutations that cause diseases and abnormal growth.
[Admission of error. Search for truth. Delight in discovering one is mistaken. Challenging received wisdom. Pure exploration wed to practical applications leading to a lessening of suffering. That happens with science every day and with religion never. Religion has two ways of admiting it was wrong: one is to have a 'new revelation' (preserve the existing bullshit and add a new layer) and one is to go atheist. It is unfortunate that in the United States there is an increasing trend toward more religion and less science.]
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