Tuesday, October 27, 2020


 Prof Linda Scott on gender inequality in the economy

World chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Oxford.Her book, The Double X Economy, has been shortlisted for the Royal Society science book prize 2020. In it, she argues that when we economically empower women, we all succeed. So thank you for talking to me today.

Prof Linda Scott: Happy to be here.

SR: So first of all, what exactly is the double X economy?

LS: So I coined the term ‘the double X economy’ to describe and denote the global economy of women, which has a very distinctive pattern of inequality in every country of the world, and is held in place by the same mechanisms in every country in the world. And so women around the world share the same experience of struggling with economic exclusion.

And that is some that’s what I call the double X economy.

SR: So, I think to me, the most obvious example of this would be the gender pay gap and this being talked about a lot in the UK in the last few years. And there seem to be quite a few people who don’t quite believe that it exists or that it’s a problem. How would you go about convincing someone that it really exists?

LS: Let me just first say that, yes, most people’s first experience or primary experience with the double X economy is the gender pay gap. So it’s a very important topic. But it’s also very important to say that the double X economy includes a full 360 degree exclusion of women. So it’s exclusion from capital and credit and all kinds of other things besides pay.

There’s been a very destructive meme that has floated around for the last maybe I would say 10 years that says the gender pay gap is a fiction. This is based on disingenuous – I would even go so far as to say dishonest or perhaps incompetent – mismanagement or manipulation of databases about pay. OK. And wherein people say, well, when we controlled for this, this and this factor, the gender pay gap didn’t exist. And therefore, if women would just not do X, Y and Z, they would be paid equally. In other words, there’s no sex discrimination going on here. If women would just learn to behave more like men, they would deserve to be paid the same. OK.

Now, the problem with this is that the variables they control far are the very items that reflect and then enforce gender inequality in the first place. And so this is why I don’t understand why any reputable vehicle would published a study like this. It’s just not good practice at all. But of course, there are lots of people out there that want to push out a meme that says, you know, gender pay gap is a fiction because they’re trying to defend male dominance.

It’s important to understand that. And if I may, I find that people often can understand this better with an analogy. And even though it’s drawn from the US, most people are aware enough of our racial issues that they kind of get that. All right. So in America, black men are paid less than white men.

Now, if you had a bunch of statisticians or economists who came around and said, well, you know, it’s not really true, because when you control for residence in a disadvantaged urban zip code or number of arrests or time spent unemployed, we find that, in fact, black men and white men are paid the same.

Therefore, there’s no such thing as racism in America. If black men would just act like white men, they wouldn’t have a problem, right? Well, we’d be horrified by a thing like that. It wouldn’t be good science because because the very things they’ve controlled for are the things that reflect and enforced racism in America. Right. But we would also ask ourselves the question, what is up with these people that they even want to say this?

What is their motivation? Why are they pushing this bigotry out on us? OK. And we need to be saying the same thing about this meme about the gender pay gap, because it is completely false. There are lots of ways to measure the gender gap in pay worldwide. Lots of different people do lots of different ways. And all of them. All of them come out with the same conclusion. That is that there’s a pay gap.

SR: So why is there a pay gap?

LS: There is a pay gap because women are generally seen to deserve less across the whole double X economy.

So we see them cheated and shortchanged on pay, but also, for example, by customers in the business or suppliers in a business or by bankers when they apply for credit or investors when they apply for for funding. And so it goes right across the economy that the world economy and world culture, that women just simply shouldn’t get as much.

And the fact that women shouldn’t even be interested in money, that it’s somehow immoral or or selfish for women to want money. So that’s really what this is about. It’s not about deserving less. It’s not about being, you know, less competent or any other asset.

SR: It seems that one of the the factors that affects this is when a couple decides to have children, that the women is disproportionately affected in terms of future career development, is that right?

LS: Oh, absolutely. Yes, that’s true. Although increasingly we are also seeing an impact on fathers. And it’s not nearly as much as the impact on mothers, but it reflects what I think is truly behind what we’re calling now, the motherhood penalty.

Motherhood penalty is a phenomenon that is well established and demonstrable across nations, and that is this practise of paying women less and holding them back in their careers regardless of their performance as a result of motherhood. And it’s not so much that motherhood is the reason as it is the means. It’s the justification for holding them back. Right. And pushing them out. And we see this especially in the pandemic. Right.

Pushing them out of the workforce by virtue of the fact that child care is made highly costly and not sufficiently available. Right. So this causes them to be pushed out.

And is often considered somehow justified and rational on the part of employers, and even natural. You know, neither one of which are are are good reasons. They’re just not valid.

SR: So that reminds me of something that surprised me in your book – one of many things that surprised me in your book – was the statistic that in Western Europe and North America, the number of women in the workforce is actually sort of levelling off. It’s not rising anymore. Do you think that’s to do with, as you just said, rising childcare costs? Or do you think there’s other reasons behind that?

LS: There are a couple of things. I would say the main reason for both the unequal pay and the flattening of the curve on female labour force participation are due to insufficient childcare. And Britain in particular has been singled out for this. It is a particularly bad problem in Britain. And the thing that is really ironic about it is that it causes these countries to hurt themselves, right, by wasting investment and by holding back their GDP.

Female labour force participation is without question, the most reliable way to increase economic growth. And holding back your women is crazy. It would pay for itself, honestly. It would pay for itself in GDP if the British government got serious about childcare.

And so, you know, this is a problem. The other thing is that in Britain, as in the rest of Europe, you’ve got about 30 percent more women in higher education than men. And this has been true for a very long time. Women also do better in school and they get more degrees.

And yet they have this societal burden that people keep loading onto them like some kind of antique impetus.

Right. OK. And that means that the nation is ploughing tax money, scholarships, all kinds of, you know, cash, investment and families, right, money into educating these women and not letting the investment pay off. It’s like building a road system and not letting anybody drive on it. It’s just foolish.

SR: So we’ve got all these highly qualified women who can’t contribute to the GDP, right?

LS: Yeah, it’s nuts.

SR: And so one thing that I’ve heard said a lot is that the reason that women aren’t reaching the highest levels in these high-paying careers like finance or business, is that women are somehow not cut out to be for those sorts of jobs. What would you say to that?

LS: Yeah. So this is a bad problem, this belief that keeps getting pushed out. And this is why so much of the book is is reliant upon updated science is because we have in particular two false, allegedly scientific claims that float around and are used against women, one, that it is somehow natural for them to be second class citizens and particularly natural for them to withdraw from life as mothers. And neither one of those things are true.

And then the other is this, this kind of notion of cognitive superiority in particular. So their brains just are, you know, defective. There is no performance or neuroscientific evidence to support that notion. None, zero, zip. It is a falsehood.

There was a time when there was a theory of testosterone in utero making a difference in boys brains. It never went anywhere. But the idea stuck with the public. And that’s because this idea that men are better and need to be better is very tenacious in its hold on the public.

But we know now. So, for example, on a macro level, test scores have closed, particularly in Britain. The gender gap has been closed for a long time. 20 plus years. And we also know that it varies much more by other things than it does by gender.

But in particular, it changes over time and has changed over time by admitting girls to higher maths classes, for example. I mean, somebody should’ve thought of that. And it actually varies by gender equality directly. In countries where there’s high gender equality, women perform high in maths. And when there’s low gender equality, they perform low. None of this could occur if this were a biologically hard wired difference. You could not have that kind of variation.

And in addition, the neuroscience at this point has completely moved on to a notion of building synapses and the connectome, which is the sort of overall pattern of the synapses that is how we learn and how we carry, acquire or lose skills through life. And this was a statistic that I wanted to bring forward here, is that actually when we’re born, we only have about six thousand genes available to start creating those synapses.

But we have to make a hundred billion of them in order to function normally as adults. So that is what the difference is, that you only have enough to make about 10 percent of that hundred billion when you’re born. So everything else about what you know and can do is acquired by learning. Right. So this idea that I mean, it’s just it’s old fashioned poppycock. It’s just folklore. It’s just not true.

May I add one more thing about that, too? One of the things that- I noticed this a lot in Britain, in British documents, even those produced by the government, which is shocking. The idea that women don’t do STEM, they don’t study STEM in university. Right. Right. This is balderdash. OK. It is unbelievable to me. The only way you can say that is if you define science, the S and STEM in a way that excludes all natural, biological sciences and medicine.

You can only make that claim if you’re going to exclude all of those sciences, which we can all agree I think are science. OK. Because in those fields, women dominate. And if you include those, then the male advantage disappears. Right. So it’s total baloney and it’s wrong of major institutions, which we see all the time perpetuating that nonsense, it’s harmful.

SR: All right. So good to know that, you know, there’s nothing biologically stopping me from, you know, succeeding in business. But if I did want to start a business, what problems would I face, that, say, a man with the same level of qualifications as me wouldn’t?

LS: OK, so this is another thing that is uniquely problematic. And Britain is the idea that you can’t do anything differently for women without disadvantaging men.

And yet, because of the history of the advantages that men have had, those have piled up into extreme advantages in the present moment. All right.

So if you want to start a business, for example, a woman is immediately disadvantaged because she will not have as much access over capital.

Now, you can trace this directly to legal and financial practices in British law that pre-date written lots. OK. So that, for example, up until the end of the 19th Century, women were not allowed to own land in Britain and that was the main store of wealth.

And so that has rolled up into this huge advantage, control over capital that men have. Women still to this day in Britain only own 13.7 per cent of the land. That’s less than the global average, which is almost 19 per cent. So it’s huge. The capital disadvantage. And unless you take intentional steps toward evening that out, it’s never going to happen. It’s never going to happen. They’re not going to be equal.

You have the same kind of problem with prejudice of the banks against women loaning them money for business loans. And so it’s really pervasive. That’s what I mean about. We need to look beyond equal pay and labour to understand this.

SR: Now, I don’t just want to talk about developed countries. So let’s also talk a bit about developing countries. So what specific economic problems would women in developing countries face?

LS: Right. OK. So, as you know, this is actually most of my own initial work was and I’ve done it a lot since with the statistics and the science.

But most of my career has been spent in very poor, poor nations in their poorest areas amongst the poorest women. And what we see and this was put got me started on this idea of is this a global issue? Because whether I was in Bangladesh are Ghana, I was seeing the same pattern of economic exclusion and I couldn’t understand why it was so, so much the same from place to place.

And this is now something that that I would say the Women’s Economic Empowerment Community, which is kind of an international force at this point, that we all have noticed this, that despite our expectations, it’s the same. So what you see in these remote areas is that the women can’t have capital, they can’t own land, have no property rights, but they also can’t control their earnings.

So if they make money, they have to turn it over to their husband or father and they can’t have a bank account, so they can’t save. So they have literally no economic resources of their own. And what this does is that it makes it possible to utterly control them. They are literally dependent on men for food and shelter. This, in turn, gives the men the freedom and permission to treat them in a very hostile way.

They basically treat them like slaves. They are brutal in terms of domestic violence. And it’s here we can recap where we can really see that the economic exclusion is just as important as the legal ramifications, the legal system, because it’s the economic disempowerment that allows a lot of that to go on and that keeps women from being able to claim even the legal rights that they have.

SR: There’s a quote in your book that I like quite a lot, and you said: “women’s economic empowerment is the best available weapon against poverty.” Could you just tell us a bit more about that?

LS: Yeah, yeah. This is something that is also pretty well established. And I would I would call attention to any listeners to the UNICEF State of the World’s Children report in 2007, which is, I think to this day, one of the best summaries of what we know, even though, you know, we’ve gone another fifteen years, right, almost in adding more evidence.

But it’s basically because it is mostly because of the way that women spend their money, that it makes such a big difference if they have money and the freedom to decide how to spend it, they inevitably spend it first on their children and next on their broader family. And then in their communities, they actually spend the last on themselves, which is actually, I think, a problem.

But we know that from an economic development perspective, that is to say poverty fighting perspective, that some of the most important things that you can do is, for example, to keep children in school, particularly girl children. And it’s the mothers who usually are responsible for that, whether they have the means or not.

If the mothers can pay the children’s school fees and expenses, those kids will stay in school. We need for those children to grow up healthy and strong. Their mothers will make sure they have nutritious meals and if at all possible, medical care.

And the fathers just don’t. And I’m sorry to say that, but they just kind of don’t some do that. The typical practice, unfortunately, is to put that on them, on the women in in those very poor remote areas. So if we want to fight that poverty, yes, get money in the hands of the mothers. That is the number one thing to do.

SR: And once they have money, they need somewhere to put it. So what could you tell us a bit about how access to bank accounts could help women living in poverty?

LS: Right. So I’m just actually finished a three year study for the Gates Foundation where we that’s what we did. We’ve got women bank accounts, mobile bank accounts. And it was really it did increase availability for all kinds of positive expenditures toward school fees, but also purchasing productive assets and things like that. And it did make a very big difference.

It also, though, we think what we’ve discovered here is the practice of what I’ve termed defensive savings. It’s being able to put aside things for the possibility that the husband will leave or that you will need to leave, which both of those happen a lot.

And in that. Saving for a rainy day kind of thing, being able to deal with a child who gets sick for instance, these things allow not just the women and their children, but families as a whole to weather the ups and downs of agricultural life, which are considerable. So, yeah, it’s really important.

SR: So why do women and poor countries struggle to have access to bank accounts?

LS: OK, so women around the world have been excluded from the financial system, I would argue since it was invented, it’s been set up to exclude women. And and that’s, you know, in a way you can see the relationship.

If they couldn’t own wealth, which they couldn’t and they couldn’t keep their own earnings, which they couldn’t even in the Western countries up until very recently, how are they going to have assets to invest in the financial sector now? In truth, what has happened over time and has been encouraged more lately is that women develop their own informal systems of saving and lending.

But it is obviously it’s not on the scale of the financial system. So what that means is that it has only been since the 60s and 70s that women in Europe and North America have been able to have bank accounts because they were not allowed to have them and they had to have their husband’s permission or they couldn’t have them at all. All right. And so that is still the case in the developing countries now.

And so even if the law in that country says the women can have their own bank account, out in the far out districts, right, people still don’t know that. And so the bankers won’t open an account if the woman goes in there or they’ll do something like notify the elders of her community, who in turn tell her husband, your wife has opened a bank account, get your house in order, you know? And so it’s just it’s yeah, it’s hard. It’s not easy to get them to bank.

SR: And you’ve done a lot of work in developing countries and, you know, different ways to to help women economically. And there’s one case study which I found really interesting, which was helping women to sell Avon makeup and Avon products. Could you tell us a bit about this, please?

LS: Yeah. This was something this is actually a project of my own invention, though. I was successfully I was able to get Avon’s cooperation. They did not pay for it. And they did not in any way trying to interfere with that.

And the reason I did it was because I have done a history of that include women in them, in the modern economy, in America, and at the time that the modern economy got going, businesses like Avon’s made it possible for particularly married women in rural areas, which is where the bulk of the problem is in the developing world today to our money. They were able also to provide a community with them, sense of confidence for them. It was really quite positive.

And so I went to see whether or not that same approach could be used in developing countries today. And so I contacted a lot and got permission to study their operation in South Africa. And it was remarkable because we were comparing it to the microfinance schemes that were so popular 10, 15 years ago that were so much part of the news.

And it was substantially more effective and less risky for the women than the microfinance stuff was. They didn’t go into debt spirals because the Avon system doesn’t allow that, they have a better possibility of success with these products than selling, for example, produce or curios. So.

SR: Can you just briefly explain what microfinance is?

LS: Yeah, OK. So microfinance is something that was supposedly invented by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in the early 2000s. OK. And it basically is where banks give very, very small loans to the very, very poor. And who then use it supposedly to make businesses. Now, from the beginning, Muhammad Yunus will tell you that he has said many times that he didn’t intend to empower women with this.

But from the beginning, it was women who got these loans because and it was women who provided the innovation. OK. Because microfinance loans have extremely high rates of interest – I’ve heard of them as high as 100 percent. And there have been loan sharks since money was invented. Right. People are lending to the poor at astronomical rates.

The difference here is that these banks were willing to lend to women. And in a country like Bangladesh, where women were not allowed to have credit. This was a very big deal. And so what happened was, is they would take the credit and they would invest it and they would make businesses go. They did it in groups like the informal systems I was talking about before.

Women’s standards groups, they’re called. And they would make investments, they would make decisions together and they would pool their funds and they would make money that they could then spread out to the whole membership. And it turned out that they had like a 98, 99 per cent loan repayment rate, which is very high.

And banks have a tendency to assert without evidence that women aren’t good customers for banks. But in fact, it turned out they were very good customers. So it was quite successful. But the problem was, is that their interest rates are still very high. And so it could be extremely risky for the women.

SR: Right. OK. So back to Avon. What is it about selling Avon products that was so, so useful for women in poverty? That was so different to say, you know, making products themselves to sell, or just buying things and selling them on.

LS: Yeah, OK. So they can buy things or make things to sell. But if you’re driving around the roads in South Africa, for example, you will see women along the side of the road at card tables or sitting on blankets. And it will be whatever vegetables are in season. So literally for a mile on the road, you’ll see everybody’s selling avocados. All right. Right.

And it’s out there in the heat and everything perishes and everybody’s selling exactly the same thing. So as a result, you get a lot of avocados that go unsold so that you see that the women don’t make any money, but also that a lot of food goes to waste. Right. So there’s a food security problem involved here as well. With the handcrafts, the problem is that traditional handicrafts are all about making the same objects the same way.

So you get the same kind of deal on blanket after blanket of the same stuff. There’s no variation. And also, there is the danger and discomfort of sitting out on the side of the road. Right. It’s hot. And there’s a lot of rape on the side of roads in Africa. Right. It’s not a safe thing to be doing. And the women don’t find it a very dignified thing to do either.

So the Avon stuff. But to any other kind of business reports on capital, like microfinance is used for. Avon, basically, you can start up out of your purse or your closet. OK. You do not have to sit down on the side of the road. You do it in group events or going door to door. People selling within their own communities. But actually, Avon encourages them. And we found that they do go out and sell outside their communities. But it’s done in a much, much more fluid way. Not like just sitting out on the road side.

And it provides them with a different kind of product that is high quality and reliable and it has a lot of repeat purchase. And they sell products for men and women and children. So it has very wide appeal. And they make it a very, very good margin on it. And they can grow their businesses to be quite large and actually make quite a lot of money.

And we found actually that the women – we only studied poor black women in Africa, South Africa, and that they could make after 16 months in the system, they could make enough to support a family of four, except they couldn’t cover the whole rent. So they would have to have some other kind of income or share. We found that most of them shared households with other women.

So it’s really quite it’s very low risk for them. Now, in the developed world, there is a lot of concern about Avon and complaining amongst ex-Avon representatives because of. It’s actually because women use their credit cards to finance their inventory. Avon does not do that. OK.

But they use their credit cards. And women do tend to use their credit cards to finance business because they don’t have access otherwise to capital. And this causes them to have a credit issue.

SR: And you’ve travelled to a lot of different developing countries for your work. What have you seen or learnt there that surprised you the most?

LS: Well, initially, it all surprised me, right? Initially, I was freaked out every time, someplace new. It was just, you know, so grim. Eventually, at this point, I’m not easily surprised. I’m not easily surprised. Recently, I’ll tell you two things that surprised me. One is in this project that I did with the Gates Foundation for the Gates Foundation.

We did counselling, family counselling on finances. And as a result, we learnt that the husbands were – we knew that they were not sharing financial information with the wives. And as part of this, they did. They had to share information with the wives and they chose to.

And we found that they were basically not contributing to the household and that all the household expenses were growing, were being supported by the women on very meagre and risky earnings. And the men were basically blowing everything they had on beer. It was astonishing and I knew this. I’d been working in Uganda more than a decade.

I knew they drank a lot of beer, everybody knows they drank a lot of beer. But the amount of it, the amount of money that was going to it was shocking. It was, in some cases equal to the average household income. So that surprised me.

The other thing that is, I don’t know, surprise is exactly the right word, but concern maybe more, yes, shock is what’s going on in Eastern Europe right now. The backlash, the populist backlash and repression of women’s rights that’s going on in Eastern Europe right now is this historic turn.

And it’s scary. It’s the kind of thing that could lead to a total, total backslide. And that is frightening. And I think that’s a new development that many people are not aware of. It’s really scary.

SR: Right. So what what do you think are the next steps for governments, say, in Eastern Europe, that you would like them to do to support women economically?

LS: I think that the answer to as far as the outward facing, you know, international aid part is to allocate more of their international budget that they already have to women. We know it’s more effective than the way they spend their money the rest of the time. And the women only get a tiny slice of international aid budgets and and DFID, by the way, in particular, has been a leader, but spends a penny compared to whatever else is spent.

So that may be the first thing. And in terms of the internal their own citizens, I think that they’re the they need to start taking it seriously, that they are violating the rights, the basic rights of half their citizens by not enforcing the equality law. Now, more than half their citizens, if you include male minorities.

But from a gender perspective, this is how they’re citizens and they’re just looking the other way. And I actually think that in Britain it’s particularly bad and particularly bad in the sense that the government has not looked in the mirror sharply enough and to say: what is it about the way we’ve construed this system that keeps women from being able to be equal? And I would say the positive discrimination doctrine is the number one problem. Now, I’ve talked about this a lot in the book.

There’s a whole chapter, in fact, on the failure of equal pay. And then it compares what happened in Britain to what happened in the United States. And, yeah, there’s a lot of things the British government could do. And actually the failures have been pretty uniform across all the developed nations. It’s basically women are not paid enough because the governments don’t have the will to make sure that they have equal enforcement under the law.

SR: And if I, or one of our listeners, decided that I wanted to do something to support women’s economic development. What could I do?

LS: So I propose kind of a radical idea in the book. And I call it the 80 per cent Christmas.

I absolutely think it will work. You have to start thinking about where do women wield power? The place where women wield most power in the world economy is in consumer purchasing. All right. And they virtually totally control it. On average, I’m saying the developed nations, 75 percent of consumer purchases are made by women. All right. It’s also important to understand that a significant part of GDP comes from retail purchasing, from consumer purchasing.

It’s really quite a high number. Some places high, 70 percent of GDP comes from that. And that most of that comes in the last two months of the year. In those countries where Christmas is celebrated. And so that means this is like the the vulnerable underside of the economy is Christmas shopping. I mean, who knew? Right. And so I proposed that what people do and they can do it is a grassroots effort. It would be very simple, really.

It would be no more difficult than women. The women’s marches, we’ve seem to say, OK, we’re going to we’re going to spend 80 percent less on Christmas this year than we did last year or in this case, probably 80 percent less than what we have budgeted or what we can’t spend. And we’re gonna keep doing that every year until the gender pay gap is closed.

Now, I would argue that we can all afford to spend a little less on Christmas and that a 20 per cent reduction isn’t very much. I figure I could do it just by putting more fruit in the stockings and buying cheaper wine. All right. You can just you can do it right. And nobody even has to know that you’re doing it right.

And it’s not like striking where it’s so public and there can be retaliation. Nobody even has to know you’re doing it. But we would know because retail sales for Christmas shopping are measure like week by week. And if the if the women announced they were going to do this, I promise it would get people’s attention. Retailers in particular.

SR: So what would the ongoing effect of that be? How would that help to close the gender pay gap?

LS: Yeah, I think that the problem is that women have not used the one power they have and they have not otherwise had power to force governments to be to step up and be honourable about enforcing the equality laws. And they have to realise that things like marches, you know, really they make a big splash, but mostly they don’t have you.

Most of the time they don’t have much of that. Strikes do not address the situation for women. And so they need to do something else. And I think that if people could see that they actually had the power to squeeze the economy where it hurt. All right. That I mean, that’s what strikes are about, right, is to say, OK, we’re going to stop the trains here until you do something about this. OK. All right. So what, you stop Christmas?

Well, we’re not gonna stop it, but we’re gonna make it a lot less profitable. Right. OK. And we’re going to keep doing that until you figure this out. Really? It holds their feet to the fire. It flexes muscle that women have not flex and that they do have. So I do think we’d have an impact now in the book.

I’ve also suggested that it would roll around on a real roll around the globe as, for example, the 80 per cent lunar new year. 80 per cent Diwali, 80 per cent Ramadan. 80 per cent Hanukkah. And that would have been going pretty much 24/7, 365. It would be it would be a statement. And I think I think you would get some attention.

SR: In terms of women’s economic development, what gives you hope for the future?

LS: Well, what gives me hope for the future? Several things. One is that we now have all this data that show, without question, that the gender that gender inequality is not a fiction. And we also, as I explain in the book, have the data to show that it is extremely damaging, not just in terms of holding back growth, but in terms of causing violation of rights, causing hunger.

There is causing human trafficking. And it just has a lot of really bad impacts. And so so I think that helps us to argue for why it’s important to do something about. I think that’s really important. I think for that reason, there are a lot of major world institutions now that have been, you know, committing some resources and attention to it. And that is not something the women’s movement has ever had before. So that’s great.

I think the main thing that concerns me hope is the sea change that we’ve seen in men’s attitudes in the Western countries in particular. I’m just more familiar with that data. And in Britain in particular, all the surveys show something in the neighbourhood of 75, 80 percent of the men are onboard with gender equality. Right.

It is no longer appropriate to be trashing men as a group on this. Instead, we need to allow them to be our allies and advocates. And I have a lot of hope because of that. That’s huge. We did not have that 50 years ago. That’s a big accomplishment.


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Below please find a summary of a new article will be published today in Annals of Internal MedicineAnnals summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information.

1. ACP Leaders Urge Consideration of Presidential Candidates' Proposals for a Better U.S. Health Care System Full text: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-7089

As voters cast their ballots, it is important for them to know the health care proposals of the two presidential candidates and how they will address and improve the U.S. health care system especially in light of the problems with the system that have been underscored this year during the COVID-19 pandemic, say leaders from the American College of Physicians (ACP). In an opinion piece published in Annals of Internal Medicine today, they compared the proposals of President Donald Trump and former Vice-President Joe Biden, to ACP's comprehensive framework for improving health care in the U.S.

Better Is Possible: The American College of Physicians' Vision for the U.S. Health Care System was published (https://www.acpjournals.org/toc/aim/172/2_Supplement) earlier this year and lays out ACP's comprehensive, interconnected set of recommendations for systematic health care reforms. The series begins with an overview paper that seeks to answer the question, "what would a better health care system for all Americans look like?" An additional set of ACP policy papers address issues related to coverage and cost of care, health care payment and delivery systems, barriers to care and social determinants of health, and more.

The new piece begins by stating that "Health care in the United States costs too much, is unaffordable for too many, spends too much on administration, produces outcomes that are unfavorable compared to other countries, misaligns incentives with patient interests, and undervalues primary care and public health." It further notes that while ACP is a non-partisan physician-led member organization, they believe it is important to identify key differences in the candidates' policies on health care issues that affect patients. Throughout, they reference how the COVID-19 pandemic has shone a light on why these improvements need to be made.

The article compares ACP's healthcare vision to the views and public records of the candidates on eight different challenges facing the U.S. health care system including:

  • Achieving universal health care coverage.
  • Ensuring coverage for those with pre-existing conditions.
  • All insurance plans including an essential health care benefit package emphasizing high-value care.
  • Expansion of Medicaid to lower-income persons in all states.
  • Prescription drug pricing.
  • Physician payment reform that appropriately values primary care and cognitive care services.
  • Decreasing health care administrative requirements and standardizing and streamlining billing and reporting.
  • Equitable access to care regardless of an individual's personal characteristics or life circumstances.

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Media contacts: Please click the link to read the full text. To speak with someone from ACP, please contact Jacquelyn Blaser at jblaser@acponline.org or 202-261-4572.

 

UCalgary researchers discover new tactic to stop the growth of a deadly brain cancer

The findings indicate the body may be the ultimate weapon against glioblastoma, but it needs help

UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Research News

University of Calgary scientists and members of the Clark H. Smith Brain Tumour Centre at the Arnie Charbonneau Cancer Institute at the Cumming School of Medicine (CSM) have discovered a way to stop the growth of glioblastoma, the deadliest form of brain cancer. The finding, published in Nature Communications, provides a new tactic in the war against cancer that involves reprogramming the immune system to do what it does best - fight the tumour instead of fueling it.

For some time, scientists have observed a tumour's ability to recruit cells from the immune system. Until now, they did not understand how the tumour was able to do that.

"We discovered that glioblastoma cells secrete a specific factor, called interleukin 33," says Stephen Robbins, PhD, co-principal investigator on the study, and professor at the CSM. "It's this substance that draws immune cells to the tumour and helps to create an environment that changes the function of the immune cells. Instead of fighting the tumour, the immune cells go to work for it, contributing to the tumour's rapid growth."

Interleukin 33 (IL-33) is not new to researchers. It is referred to as an alarmin. Just like it sounds, alarmin raises an alarm in the body that signals the immune system. The research, conducted in mice, shows that when the tumour cells release IL-33 it signals the immune cells to the tumour. However, its job does not stop there, IL-33 also works in the nucleus of the tumour cell, which is critical, as it is this change that triggers the transformation in the immune cells. Altering their function from fighting tumour growth to promoting it.

Current treatment for glioblastoma includes surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, which can be effective, but is not curative. This type of tumour is very resilient, however, the researchers found that there is a way to stop the tumour's growth.

"We found that by stopping IL-33 from reaching the nucleus of the tumour cell, it crippled the entire process," says Dr. Donna Senger, PhD, co-principal investigator on the study, and research associate professor at the CSM. "When we interrupt this step, the immune cells come into the tumour and can do the job they were meant to do. Attack the cancer."

When the IL-33 process was disrupted, survival rates increased to over a year, from two months or less. While this study was in mice, glioblastomas in people behave similarly. The researchers say this discovery provides an additional strategy for the medical community to consider to contain and possibly destroy this fatal cancer.

"New findings like this one advances our fundamental understanding of how we can potentially re-program our immune system precisely to attack and destroy glioblastoma and other cancers," says Dr. Victor Ling, Terry Fox Research Institute (TFRI) president and scientific director. "Our congratulations to this pan-Canadian team, led from the University of Calgary, for demonstrating how translational cancer research built on collaboration, and open and transparent data sharing, can have profound results."

Robbins and Senger add this finding can help shift the conversation and approach to fighting cancer to move beyond targeting the cancer cell to now include the host immune system as part of the artillery.

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Random effects key to containing epidemics

The inherent randomness of contacts between infected and healthy individuals enhances the benefit of dividing a population into smaller communities for the control of epidemics

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF PHYSICS

Research News

WASHINGTON, October 27, 2020 -- To control an epidemic, authorities will often impose varying degrees of lockdown. In a paper in the journal Chaos, by AIP Publishing, scientists have discovered, using mathematics and computer simulations, why dividing a large population into multiple subpopulations that do not intermix can help contain outbreaks without imposing contact restrictions within those local communities.

"The key idea is that, at low infection numbers, fluctuations can alter the course of the epidemics significantly, even if you expect an exponential increase in infection numbers on average," said author Ramin Golestanian.

When infection numbers are high, random effects can be ignored. But subdividing a population can create communities so small that the random effects matter.

"When a large population is divided into smaller communities, these random effects completely change the dynamics of the full population. Randomness causes peak infection numbers to be brought way down," said author Philip Bittihn.

To tease out the way randomness affects an epidemic, the investigators first considered a so-called deterministic model without random events. For this test, they assumed that individuals in each subpopulation encounter others at the same rate they would have in the large population. Even though subpopulations are not allowed to intermix, the same dynamics are observed in the subdivided population as in the initial large population.

If, however, random effects are included in the model, dramatic changes ensue, even though the contact rate in the subpopulations is the same as in the full one.

A population of 8 million individuals with 500 initially infected ones was studied using an infectious contact rate seen for COVID-19 with mild social distancing measures in place. With these parameters, the disease spreads exponentially with infections doubling every 12 days.

"If this population is allowed to mix homogeneously, the dynamics will evolve according to the deterministic prediction with a peak around 5% infected individuals," said Bittihn.

However, if the population is split into 100 subpopulations of 80,000 people each, the peak percentage of infected individuals drops to 3%. If the community is split up even further to 500 subgroups of 16,000 each, the infection peaks at only 1% of the initial population.

The main reason subdividing the population works is because the epidemic is completely extinguished in a significant fraction of the subgroups. This "extinction effect" occurs when infection chains spontaneously terminate.

Another way subdividing works is by desynchronizing the full population. Even if outbreaks occur in the smaller communities, the peaks may come at different times and cannot synchronize and add up to a large number.

"In reality, subpopulations cannot be perfectly isolated, so local extinction might only be temporary," Golestanian said. "Further study is ongoing to take this and suitable countermeasures into account."

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The article, "Stochastic effects on the dynamics of an epidemic due to population subdivision," is authored by Philip Bittihn and Ramin Golestanian. The article will appear in Chaos on Oct. 27, 2020 (DOI: 10.1063/5.0028972). After that date, it can be accessed at https://aip.scitation.org/doi/10.1063/5.0028972.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

Chaos is devoted to increasing the understanding of nonlinear phenomena in all areas of science and engineering and describing their manifestations in a manner comprehensible to researchers from a broad spectrum of disciplines. See https://aip.scitation.org/journal/cha.

"Fireball" meteorite contains pristine extraterrestrial organic compounds

FIELD MUSEUM

Research News

IMAGE

IMAGE: SECURITY CAMERA FOOTAGE OF THE FIREBALL IN THE SKY OVER TOLEDO, OHIO. VIDEO FOOTAGE CAN BE FOUND AT HTTPS://WWW.AMSMETEORS.ORG/VIDEOS/?VIDEO_ID=999 AND CAN BE SHARED WITH CREDIT.... view more 

CREDIT: T. MASTERSON AND THE AMERICAN METEOR SOCIETY

On the night of January 16, 2018, a fireball meteor streaked across the sky over the Midwest and Ontario before landing on a frozen lake in Michigan. Scientists used weather radar to find where the pieces landed and meteorite hunters were able to collect the meteorite quickly, before its chemical makeup got changed by exposure to liquid water. And, as a new paper in Meteoritics & Planetary Science shows, that gave scientists a glimpse of what space rocks are like when they're still in outer space--including a look at pristine organic compounds that could tell us about the origins of life.

"This meteorite is special because it fell onto a frozen lake and was recovered quickly. It was very pristine. We could see the minerals weren't much altered and later found that it contained a rich inventory of extraterrestrial organic compounds," says Philipp Heck, a curator at the Field Museum, associate professor at the University of Chicago, and lead author of the new paper. "These kinds of organic compounds were likely delivered to the early Earth by meteorites and might have contributed to the ingredients of life."

Meteorites, simply put, are space rocks that have fallen to Earth. When things like asteroids collide in outer space, fragments can break off. These pieces of rock, called meteoroids, continue floating through space, and sometimes, their new paths collide with moons or planets. When a meteoroid breaks through the Earth's atmosphere and we can see it as a fireball or shooting star, it's called a meteor. If pieces of that meteor survive the trip through the atmosphere, the bits that actually land on Earth are called meteorites.

When the fireball arrived in Michigan, scientists used NASA's weather radar to track where the pieces went. "Weather radar is meant to detect hail and rain," explains Heck. "These pieces of meteorite fell into that size range, and so weather radar helped show the position and velocity of the meteorite. That meant that we were able to find it very quickly."

Less than two days after it landed, meteorite hunter Robert Ward found the first piece of the meteorite on the frozen surface of Strawberry Lake, near Hamburg, Michigan. Ward worked with Terry Boudreaux to donate the meteorite to the Field Museum, where Heck and Jennika Greer, a graduate student at the Field and the University of Chicago and one of the paper's authors, began to study it.

"When the meteorite arrived at the Field, I spent the entire weekend analyzing it, because I was so excited to find out what kind of meteorite it was and what was in it," says Greer. "With every meteorite that falls, there's a chance that there's something completely new and totally unexpected."

The researchers quickly determined that the meteorite was an H4 chondrite--only 4% of all meteorites falling to Earth these days are of this type. But the real thing that makes the Hamburg meteorite exceptional is because of how quickly it was collected and how well-analyzed it is.

"This meteorite shows a high diversity of organics, in that if somebody was interested in studying organics, this is not normally the type of meteorite that they would ask to look at," says Greer. "But because there was so much excitement surrounding it, everybody wanted to apply their own technique to it, so we have an unusually comprehensive set of data for a single meteorite."


Scientists aren't sure how the organic (carbon-containing) compounds responsible for life on Earth got here; one theory is that they hitched their way here on meteorites. That doesn't mean that the meteorites themselves contain extraterrestrial life; rather, some of the organic compounds that help make up life might have first formed in an asteroid that later fell to Earth. (In short, sorry, we didn't find any aliens.)

"Scientists who study meteorites and space sometimes get asked, do you ever see signs of life? And I always answer, yes, every meteorite is full of life, but terrestrial, Earth life," says Heck. "As soon as the thing lands, it gets covered with microbes and life from Earth. We have meteorites with lichens growing on them. So the fact that this meteorite was collected so quickly after it fell, and that it landed on ice rather than in the dirt, helped keep it cleaner."

The buzz around the meteorite when it landed also helped scientists learn much more about it than many other meteorites of its kind--they used a wide variety of analytical techniques and studied samples from different parts of the meteorite to get a more complete picture of the minerals it contains. "You learn a lot more about a meteorite when you sample different pieces. It's like if you had a supreme pizza, if you only looked at one little section, you might think it was just pepperoni, but there might be mushrooms or peppers somewhere else," says Greer.

"This study is a demonstration of how we can work with specialists around the world to get most out of the small piece of raw, precious piece of rock," says Heck. "When a new meteorite falls onto a frozen lake, maybe even sometime this winter, we'll be ready. And that next fall might be something we have never seen before."

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Effect of electroacupuncture on chronic low back pain

JAMA NETWORK OPEN

Research News

What The Study Did:
This randomized clinical trial compared the change in pain severity among adults with chronic low back pain who received electroacupuncture or a placebo treatment.

Authors:
Jiang-Ti Kong, M.D., of the Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, is the corresponding author.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

(doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22787)

Editor's Note:
The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, conflict of interest and financial disclosures, and funding and support.






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Media advisory:
The full study is linked to this news release. A visual abstract is below.

Embed this link to provide your readers free access to the full-text article This link will be live at the embargo time http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22787?utm_source=For_The_Media&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=ftm_links&utm_term=102720

About JAMA Network Open:

JAMA Network Open is the new online-only open access general medical journal from the JAMA Network. On weekdays, the journal publishes peer-reviewed clinical research and commentary in more than 40 medical and health subject areas. Every article is free online from the day of publication.

Saving the climate from the ground up

International research team formulates strategy against the greenhouse effect

UNIVERSITY OF BONN

Research News

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IMAGE: INCREASED CARBON INPUTS INTO THE SOIL COULD SLOW DOWN CLIMATE CHANGE AND AT THE SAME TIME INCREASE CROP YIELDS, THE INTERNATIONAL RESEARCH TEAM EMPHASIZES. view more 

CREDIT: FRANK LUERWEG / UNIVERSITY OF BONN

Soil has the capacity to bind large quantities of carbon in the long term. An international team of researchers, including from the University of Bonn, is now advocating effective use of this potential. Experts estimate that this could reduce the increase of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by a third. At the same time, agricultural yields in many regions would also increase significantly. In a recent publication they present a strategy to achieve these goals. The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The climate summit in Paris in 2015 was also the birth of the so-called "4 per 1,000" initiative. Its name stands for a link that has not received enough attention in climate research and politics for a long time: Every year the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increases by more than four billion tons due to the man-made greenhouse gas CO2. If these four billion tons were instead sequestered in the earth's soils (thus completely halting the greenhouse effect), the amount of carbon contained in the soil would grow by only 0.4 per cent annually (i.e. 4 out of 1,000). In other words: Soils are already a gigantic carbon store. So why not simply dump the excess CO2 in it as an additional minuscule amount?

Experts are indeed confident today that this strategy could significantly slow down climate change. "0.4 percent additional carbon input is somewhat too optimistic," explains Prof. Wulf Amelung, who heads the Division of Soil Science at the University of Bonn. "However, a third of this is probably achievable." Nevertheless, little has changed since 2015. Together with colleagues from Europe, the USA, Australia and China, Amelung and colleagues therefore want to put the issue back on the agenda. In the current issue of the journal Nature Communications, they outline a strategy to effectively use the potential of soils in the fight against climate change. Amelung, together with his French colleague Prof. Abad Chabbi, is in charge of the initiative; in Germany, the TU Munich and Forschungszentrum Jülich were also involved.

There are a number of simple measures to increase the amount of carbon in the soil, such as mulching (i.e. covering the soil with crop residues) or adding plant-based coal. The most important method, however, is to increase plant growth (and thus crop yields): by liming acidic soils, by fertilizing as needed, by using smart irrigation. "The more grows on the soil, the better is it rooted," explains Amelung. "And roots with their widely branching networks of organic material store lots of carbon." Conversely, the organic matter contains essential nutrients for plant growth and thus promotes crop yield. "Our strategy therefore ultimately addresses two important goals: climate protection and food security."

Measures must be adapted locally

However, the global implementation of this ambitious plan is not quite so simple: The quality and characteristics of soils in different locations are too different, and the available management technologies are too dissimilar. "Increasing the carbon input therefore requires locally adapted measures; we need completely different strategies in the rice-growing regions of Asia than, for example, on a cereal field in northern Germany," Amelung emphasizes. In addition, many carbon sequestration measures are particularly effective when soils are partially degraded by long-term overuse and have lost a lot of carbon. "From a cost-benefit perspective, it certainly makes the most sense to start on such areas, not least because the yield increases are likely to be greatest there," explains the soil expert.

Unfortunately, however, knowledge about the condition of soil is very patchy. The researchers therefore recommend the establishment of databases that record the condition of land around the globe on a very small scale, as well as an equally small-scale modeling of possible yield gains and the necessary use of fertilizers. It must furthermore be ensured that there is no mere redistribution of carbon inputs: for example, organic material is moved from one farm to another at great expense and is now missing at its place of origin.

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Participating countries:
The study involved institutions from France, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, the United Kingdom, Australia, China, Belgium and Switzerland.

Publication:
W. Amelung, D. Bossio, W. de Vries, I. Kögel-Knabner, J. Lehmann, R. Amundson, R. Bol, C. Collins, R. Lal, J. Leifeld, B. Minasny, G. Pan, K. Paustian, C. Rumpel, J. Sanderman, J.W. van Groenigen, S. Mooney, B. van Wesemael, M. Wander and A. Chabbi: Towards a global-scale soil climate mitigation strategy; Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/s41467-020-18887-7

Beaches can survive sea-level rises as long as they have space to move

UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH

Research News

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IMAGE: SLAPTON SANDS IN DEVON (UK), WITH THE VILLAGE OF TORCROSS IN THE FOREGROUND, IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHERE THE BEACH HAS SPACE TO MOVE AND THEREFORE SURVIVE view more 

CREDIT: UNIVERSITY OF PLYMOUTH

An international team of coastal scientists has dismissed suggestions that half the world's beaches could become extinct over the course of the 21st century.

The claim was made by European researchers in a paper published in Nature Climate Change in March 2020 (Sandy coastlines under threat of erosion by Vousdoukas et al).

However, academics from the UK, France, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the USA have re-examined the data and methodology that underpinned the original study and say they strongly disagree with its conclusion.

They have now published a rebuttal to the article in the same journal, and concluded that with the global data and numerical methods available today it is impossible to make such global and wide-reaching predictions.

Critical to their disagreement with the original paper's conclusions is the fact that they say there is potential for beaches to migrate landwards as sea level rises and shorelines retreat.

The key notion behind that is that if beaches have space to move into under the influence of rising sea levels - referred to as accommodation space - they will retain their overall shape and form but in a more landward position.

The new research says that beaches backed by hard coastal cliffs and engineering structures, such as seawalls, are indeed likely to disappear in the future due to sea-level rise as these beaches are unable to migrate landward.

They will first experience 'coastal squeeze' resulting in a decrease in width, and will eventually drown.

However, beaches backed by low-lying coastal plains, shallow lagoons, salt marshes and dunes will migrate landward as a result of rising sea level. In these cases, the shoreline will retreat, but the beaches are still likely to remain, albeit a little raised in elevation and located landward, and will certainly not go 'extinct'.

The new paper says there is currently no information available globally on the number of beaches which fall into either category and, as such, it is impossible to quantify what proportion of the world's beaches will disappear between now and 2100.

Andrew Cooper, Professor of Coastal Studies at Ulster University and the new paper's lead author, said: "New methods are needed for predicting impacts of sea-level rise on the coast. This will require better datasets of coastal morphology and improved understanding of the mechanisms of shoreline response in given settings. As sea level rises, shoreline retreat must, and will, happen but beaches will survive. The biggest threat to the continued existence of beaches is coastal defence structures that limit their ability to migrate."

Co-author Professor Gerd Masselink, from the University of Plymouth's Coastal Processes Research Group, led a study earlier this year which found that island 'drowning' is not inevitable as sea levels rise.

He added: "Sea level is currently rising and will continue to rise at an increasing rate for many years to come. This will lead to more coastal erosion and it is crucial that we anticipate the future loss of land and take this into account in coastal management and planning to avoid putting more buildings and coastal infrastructure in harm's way. In the UK, Coastal Change Management Areas (CCMAs) are becoming increasingly important as a planning tool. CCMAs are areas that are likely to be affected by coastal change in the future and development in these areas should be avoided. This will then enable the coastline to respond naturally to sea-level rise, preventing coastal squeeze and loss of beaches."

Coastal structures such as seawalls prevent beaches from naturally adjusting to rising sea levels by migrating landward and in those settings, removal of the structures (managed realignment) or nature-based solutions (beach nourishment) may be the only methods to safeguard the future of these beaches.

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Yeast study yields insights into longstanding evolution debate

YALE UNIVERSITY

Research News

In the past two decades, researchers have shown that biological traits in both species and individual cells can be shaped by the environment and inherited even without gene mutations, an outcome that contradicts one of the classical interpretations of Darwinian theory.

But exactly how these epigenetic, or non-genetic, traits are inherited has been unclear.

Now, in a study published Oct. 27 in the journal Cell Reports, Yale scientists show how epigenetic mechanisms contribute in real time to the evolution of a gene network in yeast. Specifically, through multiple generations yeast cells were found to pass on changes in gene activity induced by researchers.

The finding helps shed light on a longstanding question in evolutionary biology; scientists have long debated whether organisms can pass on traits acquired during a lifetime.

"Do genetic mutations have to be the sole facilitator of gene network evolution or can epigenetic mechanisms also lead to stable and heritable gene expression states maintained generation after generation?" asked Yale's Murat Acar, associate professor of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, a faculty member at the Yale Systems Biology Institute, and senior author of the paper.

During much of the last half of the 20th century, biology students were taught that mutations of genes that helped species adapt to the environment were passed on through generations, eventually leading to tremendous diversity of life. However, this theory had a problem: advantageous mutations are rare, and it would take many generations for physiological changes caused by the mutation to take root in a population of any given species.

Scientists in the last century have found that certain regions of DNA do not code for genes but regulate gene activity in the face of environmental change. The concept of passing on stable gene expression states to offspring resurrected the once widely discredited theories of 18th century French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who first proposed inheritance of traits acquired during a lifetime.

For the new study, Acar lab graduate students and co-first authors Xinyue Luo and Ruijie Song wanted to investigate the role of epigenetic inheritance in the evolution of gene network activity in individual yeast cells, which reproduce asexually about every 100 minutes. As their experimental model, they investigated a gene network known as the galactose utilization network, which regulates use of the sugar-like molecule galactose, in the yeast. Through daily cell-sorting, they segregated the cells that had lowest levels of gene expression in the population and grew these cells in the same environment over a period of seven days.

Ultimately, they found expression level reductions persisted for several days and multiple generations of reproduction after the 7-day segregation period. Genetic causes alone could not explain the expression reduction; inheritance of epigenetic factors contributed to the observed change, the Yale team found.

Acar said the findings show a clear Lamarckian epigenetic contribution to gene network evolution and the classic Darwinian interpretation of evolution alone cannot explain our observations. "The findings support the idea that both genetic and epigenetic mechanisms need to be combined in a 'grand unified theory of evolution,'" he said.

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Other authors include Mark Hochstrasser, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, and postdoctoral associates David Moreno and Hong-Yeoul Ryu.