Two weeks ago I wrote about some tantalizing research coming out of the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. Brian Dias, a postdoctoral fellow in Kerry Ressler’s lab at Emory University, had reported that mice inherit specific smell memories from their fathers — even when the offspring have never experienced that smell before, and even when they’ve never met their father. What’s more, their children are born with the same specific memory.

This was a big, surprising claim, causing many genetics experts to do a double-take, as I discovered from a subsequent flurry of Tweets. “Crazy Lamarkian shit,” quipped Laura Hercher (@laurahercher), referring to Lamarckian inheritance, the largely discredited theory that says an organism can pass down learned