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- All creatures, then, live in two histories at once: their inherited evolutionary history, built up by their ancestors over many thousands of years, and their personal organic history, lived through a single life cycle. Epigenetics is a bridge between these two domains, adapting evolutionary advantages to the demands of the present moment. It etches the uncertainty of our life experience directly onto our biology. In fact, philosophers of genetics Paul Griffiths and Karola Stolz have gone so far as to suggest that we abandon the idea of genes as fixed units of information and define genes instead as “things you can do with your genome.”