Wendy Wheeler’s lecture on Green Imaginaries: Biosemiotics, History, Memory and the Future, featured many interesting thoughts upon the natural world and its connection with the environment. Dr. Wheeler described the importance of complexity in nature and how ecocriticism is a great way to understand how the environment works. I thought it was engaging how Dr. Wheeler spoke about Lamarck in her talk especially because he believed that environmental stress is due to epigenetics, which “will cause permanent effects if the environment stays that way” (Dr. Wheeler). Dr. Wheeler described Epigenetics as a very intriguing topic due to the fact that environmental stressors can create changes in a species DNA. This part of the lecture sparked my interest the most due to the fact that it ties in with my Anthropology 175 class on evolutionary medicine. In this class, we too have been talking about epigenetics and it has been one of the more interesting topics we have gone over so far. Permanent environmental stressors can explain epigenetics easily. For instance, a baby rat that is nurtured by its mother is more likely to be healthier (i.e. lower blood pressure, higher tolerance for stress, etc.). These environmental stressors that are permanent in the environment can create permanent effects on a species and can cause genes in the DNA to turn “switches” on and off. Epigenetics are like “switches” that if the environment is shown to create enough of a change to a species then that species gene will have side effects. This is another reason why twins are not exactly identical. If one twin is in an environment that can cause enough stress, this twin will come down with some type of disease manifestation while the other twin would be much healthier. This disease manifestation is due to the environmental stressors that the twins experience, causing different disease manifestation.