The Greek philosopher Aristotle was known for many other things including his heredity-driven theory called telegony, which states that a wife's offspring can possess some traits of her previous partners. For many years, scientists and geneticists had tried to prove it but failed until it was ultimately rejected-until today.
An Australian team of researchers with Angela Crean, an evolutionary ecologist as the lead, discovered a non-genetic type of inheritance that seemed to give merit to Aristotle's already debunked theory. However, before you grow anxious about the news, know that they conducted the experiments on flies only and that they don't know if they would get the same results with other species including humans.
Nevertheless, how did they come up with the results? It began by trying to control the environment of the father fly. They hypothesized that such environment can play a role on the size of the offspring. Flies that ate on maggots that were nutrient dense became bigger and produced offspring that were also large.
Given that such conditions can be manipulated, they decided to mate different sizes of male flies with their female counterparts and then observe the traits of their offspring. They found out that the size of the newly born flies was similar to that of the first partner of the female fly even if a later fly impregnated it.
Although they still can't figure what or how it happened, questions they admitted to be difficult to answer since a semen can be composed of several types of molecules, it's highly possible that a sperm of the first male had somehow found its way into a developing egg and influenced the traits or characteristics of the future offspring, sired by the female's second partner.
As to the significance of the study, Dr. Crean believes it opens new opportunities for research especially in the area of genetics, and it serves as a reminder that there's still so much humans have to learn.