Pre-publication version Meloni, Cromby, Fitzgerald and Lloyd (eds). The Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society, Springer 2018 1 Tatjana Buklijas Liggins Institute University of Auckland New Zealand Correspondence: t.buklijas@auckland.ac.nz Histories and meanings of epigenetics We are living through a revolution in our understandings of heredity, or so we are told by the media, buzzing with suggestions that our health and our personalities are determined not just by the genes passed across generations, but also by the experiences of our parents and grandparents: the wars and famines they suffered, the psychological traumas they experienced, the foods they ate (Blech 2010, Costandi 2011, Shulevitz 2012, Knapton 2014). These experiences are inscribed and, arguably, inherited through a network of mechanisms that act as ‘the molecular memory of past stimuli’, modifying gene expression to supplement the slower-changing information encoded in the DNA sequence (Bonasio, Tu et al. 2010). The best studied mechanisms are DNA methylation (binding of a small chemical group, CH3, onto the cytosine base of DNA) and the modifications of histones, proteins that package DNA into nucleosomes and in turn change the spatial conformation of chromatin. But other, less studied mechanisms, in the first place the activity of RNAs of different types, may play equal or even more important roles (Heard and Martienssen 2014). Epigenetic control of gene expression may have profound implications for biology, medicine and wider society. It may, for example, open up new avenues to explain, predict