Logical Continuations
26 questions
Read the short passage below and determine the most appropriate single word to logically complete the author's argument.
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During the late nineteenth century, the burgeoning field of legal realism fundamentally challenged the formalist paradigm that had long dominated American jurisprudence. Formalism posited that the law was a complete, autonomous system of logical axioms; judges were merely technicians who mechanically deduced the correct legal outcome from established precedents and statutory texts without recourse to policy considerations or empirical realities. In stark contrast, early legal realists argued that this "mechanical jurisprudence" was a myth that obscured the actual process of judicial decision-making. They asserted that judges inevitably inject their own moral, political, and economic predilections into their rulings, often working backward from a preferred conclusion to find the legal principles necessary to justify it.
By emphasizing the indeterminacy of legal language and the malleability of precedent, the realists sought to demystify the law and align it more closely with the social sciences. They advocated for a pragmatic jurisprudence where judges explicitly weigh social consequences and policy goals rather than hiding behind a veneer of objective deduction. However, despite its profound critical success in dismantling the formalist illusion, early legal realism struggled to articulate a coherent normative framework to replace the system it had torn down. If judicial decisions were primarily driven by individual biases and policy preferences rather than objective rules, the fundamental legitimacy of the judicial system appeared vulnerable. Critics were quick to point out that without the constraining anchor of formalism, judicial power could easily become arbitrary and unmoored from democratic accountability.
Thus, as the realist movement matured into the mid-twentieth century, its proponents were forced to reconcile their empirical critique of judicial behavior with the pressing need to preserve the rule of law. To address this crisis of legitimacy, later realists turned their attention away from merely exposing the subjective nature of judicial decision-making, and instead focused on ______________
Which of the following most logically completes the passage?
Scholars have long debated whether the concept of private property originated as a natural outgrowth of human social instinct or as a deliberate construct necessitated by the advent of agriculture. The traditional view, championed by agrarian determinists, argues that prior to the cultivation of crops, nomadic hunter-gatherer societies had no practical need for exclusive land ownership. In these early societies, resources were ephemeral and mobility was paramount; thus, territorial boundaries were porous, and the concept of exclusion was virtually nonexistent.
However, recent anthropological evidence challenges this agrarian-centric paradigm. Researchers examining the material culture of the Jōmon period—a predominantly hunter-gatherer culture—have discovered extensive, sedentary settlements complete with large-scale storage facilities and localized resource exploitation. These findings suggest that the Jōmon not only defended specific foraging territories but also practiced hereditary transfer of highly productive fishing sites and nut groves. Consequently, the assertion that property rights are inextricably linked to agricultural surplus appears empirically untenable.
Instead, a more nuanced framework, the "resource predictability hypothesis," posits that territoriality and property concepts emerge whenever a society relies on dense, predictable, and localized resources, regardless of whether those resources are wild or cultivated. Under this model, the critical catalyst for property rights is not the act of planting seeds, but rather the economic viability of defending a fixed resource base. If a nomadic group discovers a reliably abundant salmon run, for instance, the energy expended to monopolize and protect that location is offset by the caloric yield.
Thus, the paradigm must shift from a binary focus on agriculture to a broader analysis of ecological economics. If we accept the resource predictability hypothesis, it forces us to reevaluate the social structures of numerous pre-agricultural societies previously assumed to be strictly egalitarian and non-territorial. In doing so, we might ultimately conclude that ____________
Which of the following best completes the final sentence of the passage?
Read the following academic passage and determine the most logical word or short phrase to complete the author's concluding thought.
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In response to these behavioral anomalies, defenders of the classical model have often adopted an expansive redefinition of 'utility.' They argue that utility should not be understood in strictly financial or material terms, but must also encompass the psychological satisfaction or social prestige derived from moral or altruistic behavior. According to this revised framework, an individual who donates to charity is still acting in a perfectly rational, utility-maximizing manner, because the internal emotional reward of the donation outweighs the financial cost.
While this theoretical adjustment successfully accommodates the anomalies observed by behavioral economists, critics argue that it does so at a fatal epistemic cost. The primary value of any predictive scientific model lies in its falsifiability—its ability to specify conditions or outcomes that would prove the model wrong. If the classical theory of consumer behavior is modified so that every conceivable action is defined, retroactively, as an attempt to maximize some subjective form of utility, the model loses all of its predictive power. By expanding the definition of utility to encompass literally any motivation, the theory is rendered entirely tautological; it essentially posits that people do what they do because they want to do it. Consequently, this expanded classical model ceases to be a useful scientific tool, because under its parameters, it is impossible to conceive of any human action that could be categorized as .
In the study of early Mesopotamian legal systems, scholars have long debated the exact function of the celebrated Code of Hammurabi, a massive diorite stele inscribed with hundreds of conditional legal provisions. Early twentieth-century historians predominantly viewed the stele as a statutory code in the modern sense—a comprehensive set of rules intended to be strictly applied by judges to resolve disputes. According to this traditional view, the text served as a prescriptive legislative document that standardized legal practice across the diverse territories of the Babylonian empire, bringing disparate regional customs under a unified legal framework.
However, more recent historiography has cast significant doubt on this interpretation. Modern Assyriologists note a glaring inconsistency: the myriad of surviving cuneiform court records from the Old Babylonian period almost never cite the Code of Hammurabi. Furthermore, the judgments rendered in those everyday records frequently do not align with the specific penalties prescribed on the stele. Instead, the surviving trial documents reflect a functional legal practice governed largely by local custom, oral tradition, and the discretionary wisdom of municipal magistrates.
If the stele was not a binding legal code to be consulted in court, what purpose did it serve? A growing consensus among contemporary scholars suggests that the monument was fundamentally a piece of royal propaganda, an ideological treatise designed to project the image of Hammurabi as a divine king of justice. The specific "laws" inscribed on the monument were likely not rigid statutes but rather idealized scholastic examples of the king’s wisdom—literary exercises demonstrating his ability to maintain cosmic order, protect the vulnerable, and establish truth. Thus, when a Babylonian judge rendered a decision, he was not consulting a codified rulebook. Rather,
Which of the following most logically completes the passage's final sentence?
Read the following passage regarding economic theories of technological adoption and market efficiency. Based on the logical progression of the author's argument, provide a single verb that best completes the final sentence.
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Skeptics of path dependence argue that such lock-ins are inherently fragile. They maintain that if a locked-in technology is genuinely inefficient, the potential economic gains from adopting a superior alternative will eventually outweigh the friction of transition. In this classical view, entrepreneurs, driven by the prospect of capturing these unexploited gains, will bear the initial costs of switching, thereby breaking the lock-in. Thus, classical economists insist that while history might temporarily delay optimization, it cannot permanently thwart it.
This counterargument, however, fundamentally misunderstands the anatomy of switching costs in complex networks. Switching costs are not static hurdles; they are dynamic and endogenous, scaling exponentially as the network surrounding the inferior standard expands. Every new user of the locked-in technology, every complementary product developed for it, and every institutional framework designed around it adds another layer of friction against transition. Therefore, the very market mechanisms—such as network externalities and economies of scale—that classical economists rely upon to eventually dismantle the lock-in are, in reality, the exact forces that the inefficiency.
Prior to the widespread adoption of standardized coinage, economic exchange relied almost exclusively on the barter system, a mechanism fundamentally constrained by what economists term the "double coincidence of wants." In such a system, an individual possessing surplus grain and desiring cloth must locate not merely someone with surplus cloth, but specifically someone with surplus cloth who simultaneously desires grain. This structural inefficiency imposed severe transaction costs, limiting the scale of economic networks to localized communities where mutual needs could be more readily identified and fulfilled.
The introduction of minted currency in the first millennium BCE represented a profound conceptual leap. By establishing a universally accepted medium of exchange, societies decoupled the act of selling from the act of buying. A farmer could exchange grain for silver coins with one merchant, and subsequently use those coins to purchase cloth from another at a later date. This temporal and spatial flexibility drastically reduced the friction inherent in daily transactions. Furthermore, because standardized coins carried an intrinsic, verifiable value, merchants no longer needed to meticulously assess the quality of disparate goods offered in trade.
However, the implications of this monetary revolution extended far beyond the convenience of local marketplaces. As currency became widely recognized across varying political jurisdictions, the geographical constraints that had previously bound economic activity began to dissolve. Merchants, previously deterred by the logistical nightmare of transporting bulky surplus goods to distant regions in the mere hope of finding a willing barter partner, found their operations fundamentally transformed. Because wealth could now be condensed into portable, universally desirable units, __________________.
Which of the following most logically completes the passage?
In contemporary jurisprudence, the debate between originalist and non-originalist interpretations of constitutional text often hinges on the concept of "original public meaning." Proponents of the new originalism argue that judges are bound not by the subjective intentions of the framers—a metric fraught with historical and psychological ambiguity—but rather by the objective meaning the constitutional text would have conveyed to a reasonable, informed citizen at the time of its ratification. This shift, its advocates claim, grounds constitutional interpretation in an empirical historical reality, thereby constraining judicial fiat and preserving the democratic legitimacy of the foundational document.
However, the pursuit of a singular "original public meaning" confronts a formidable historiographical hurdle: the semantic multiplicity inherent in any politically charged epoch. As legal historians point out, late eighteenth-century political discourse was rarely characterized by semantic consensus, particularly regarding the contested abstract concepts—such as "liberty," "due process," or "equal protection"—that form the bedrock of constitutional litigation. If a term possessed competing definitions among different factions of the ratifying public, elevating one specific historical understanding over others requires a normative choice by the modern interpreter, not merely a descriptive historical exercise.
Consequently, when confronting provisions where the historical record reveals deep conceptual divisions among the ratifying public, the new originalist methodology reaches an impasse. If the purported objective is to apply the text strictly according to its public meaning at ratification, yet the public at ratification was fundamentally fractured over that very meaning, the judge cannot simply "discover" the law through historical linguistics. In such instances, to resolve the interpretive dilemma without abandoning the originalist framework entirely, the adjudicator is logically forced to...
Which of the following phrases most logically completes the passage?
Carefully evaluate the following historical analysis regarding the transition from oral traditions to written records in early agrarian societies. Based on the author's line of reasoning, deduce the most appropriate verb to logically complete the final sentence of the passage.
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In pre-literate societies, oral traditions were fundamentally communal. The transmission of history and law relied on collective memory, public performance, and consensus, inherently resisting monopolization by any single political entity. The codification of such knowledge into written scripts fundamentally altered this dynamic, restricting access to a highly specialized, state-sponsored scribal elite. Early archives were largely comprised of tax records, grain inventories, and official state mythologies—documents explicitly designed to monitor resources and legitimize sovereign authority. By institutionalizing what was officially recorded, the state effectively determined what was officially remembered, sidelining the fluid, participatory nature of oral storytelling.
The capacity to read and write was thus weaponized as a tool of statecraft, alienating the broader populace from the very histories and administrative processes that governed their lives. If we accept that the earliest archives functioned not as public libraries but as instruments of bureaucratic regulation, we must critically reexamine the broader historical narrative. Rather than viewing the displacement of communal oral memory by state-controlled texts as a victory for public enlightenment, one must logically conclude that the initial implementation of literacy served primarily to political authority.
Read the following passage and fill in the blank with the most appropriate phrase to logically complete the argument.
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Imagine a newly drafted property code that incorporates adverse possession while explicitly repudiating the personality theory, adopting a strictly utilitarian rationale as its sole jurisprudential foundation. Under this code, a squatter occupies a vacant parcel. Rather than cultivating the land, they merely enclose it with a fence and utilize it as a dumping ground for highly toxic industrial runoff, rendering the soil irreversibly sterile. The original owner, a conservation trust that intentionally left the parcel dormant to serve as a crucial ecological buffer for an adjacent wetland ecosystem, discovers the squatter only after the statutory period has expired.
If the squatter were permitted to rely on the personality theory, they might compellingly argue that their prolonged, daily interaction with the parcel has irrevocably bound their identity to the space. However, because this specific jurisdiction relies exclusively on the utilitarian framework, the adjudicator must evaluate the competing claims strictly through the lens of societal benefit. The squatter has effectively destroyed the land's potential for future agricultural or civic development. Conversely, the conservation trust's intentional passivity actively maintained the broader ecosystem's viability. Therefore, an adjudicator adhering faithfully to this jurisdiction's jurisprudence would inevitably rule in favor of the original owner, paradoxically concluding that the trust's intentional non-use fulfilled the statutory mandate for far better than the squatter's active exploitation.
For decades, the dominant paradigm in fine art conservation prioritized the recovery of the artist’s 'original intent,' primarily operationalized by removing centuries of dirt, varnish, and oxidized paint to reveal the vibrant colors beneath. This approach assumes a static conception of art, wherein a painting's true form is eternally anchored to the exact moment it left the easel, uncorrupted by the environment. Proponents of this purist methodology routinely point to the striking chromatic intensity of recently cleaned Renaissance frescoes as definitive proof that early masters painted with brilliant, almost garish, palettes that were subsequently obscured by the ravages of time and soot.
However, this restorative zeal has drawn increasingly fierce criticism from a prominent faction of art historians who advocate for a more dynamic, contextual understanding of artistic intent. These critics argue that pioneering painters like Titian and Rembrandt were not naive empiricists; rather, they were intimately familiar with the chemical properties of their pigments, oils, and varnishes. Consequently, they fully anticipated how their canvases would progressively darken and mellow over the ensuing decades. By actively incorporating the inevitable patina of age into their initial compositional calculations—layering glazes that they knew would shift in transparency—these artists effectively collaborated with time itself.
From this perspective, aggressively stripping away the physical effects of aging does not recover the pristine painting the artist originally envisioned. Rather, it imposes an artificially arrested state that the creator neither intended nor desired. If a masterpiece is partially defined by its deliberate, planned interaction with temporal decay, then the modern conservator’s obsession with chemical purity is not an act of historical fidelity. Instead, it is ___________________.
Which of the following most logically completes the final sentence of the passage?
Read the passage below, which discusses the evolution of antitrust law. Based on the passage's argument, complete the concluding sentence by filling in the blanks with the appropriate concepts.
During the development of antitrust law in the mid-twentieth century, the 'Structuralist' school of economics heavily influenced judicial decisions. Structuralists posited that highly concentrated markets—those dominated by a few large firms—inherently facilitate collusive behavior and stifle innovation, regardless of the firms' actual conduct. Consequently, courts routinely blocked mergers simply because they would result in large market shares, assuming that market structure invariably dictates anti-competitive outcomes. However, the later 'Chicago School' scholars fundamentally challenged this presumption. They argued that high market concentration often results from superior efficiency and economies of scale rather than illicit collusion. In their view, if a dominant firm achieves its position by offering better products at lower prices, penalizing its mere size actually harms the consumer.
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Read the following passage and complete the final sentence by providing the most logical single word or short phrase that concludes the author's argument.
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In the mid-twentieth century, the dominant paradigm in urban planning was profoundly shaped by the functionalist doctrines of modernism. Planners, heavily influenced by prominent architects of the era, championed the strict and rigid separation of urban spaces into distinct, single-use zones. Under this prevailing model, residential neighborhoods, commercial hubs, and industrial districts were geographically isolated from one another, connected only by expansive, high-speed highway networks. The theoretical justification for this approach was deeply rooted in a desire for administrative efficiency and public hygiene: separating factories from homes would theoretically reduce airborne pollution in residential areas, while consolidating commerce into specific sectors would streamline business operations and logistics.
However, by the late 1960s, a vocal vanguard of urban sociologists began to rigorously critique this hyper-rationalized approach to city building. They observed that while functionalist zoning may have succeeded in its narrow aims of industrial containment, it simultaneously devastated the organic social fabric of daily city life. When residential neighborhoods were stripped of local retail businesses and accessible public squares, they became completely desolate during the day, just as commercial financial districts became ghostly and abandoned after business hours. This artificial segregation heavily suppressed the spontaneous, informal human interactions that historically fostered community cohesion, mutual trust, and collective street-level security.
In response to these historical failures, contemporary planners have increasingly embraced mixed-use development, a philosophy that advocates for the seamless integration of housing, retail shops, and public spaces within the same neighborhood block. By ensuring that streets remain continuously populated at all hours by a diverse array of users—from morning commuters and midday shoppers to evening diners—mixed-use zoning naturally enhances both economic vitality and public safety. Because the success of urban environments depends fundamentally on the continuous presence and interaction of their inhabitants, modern municipal authorities attempting to revitalize decaying downtowns must recognize that ______
Which of the following most logically completes the passage?
Read the passage below:
Since the Renaissance, the dominant paradigm in Western painting was linear perspective, a geometrical technique that organizes pictorial space around a single, fixed vantage point. This convention trained viewers to equate "realism" with the optical experience of a stationary observer at a specific moment in time. However, this monocular perspective is an artificial constraint, divorcing objects from their temporal and three-dimensional context. When Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque pioneered Cubism in the early twentieth century, they sought to dismantle this perceptual monopoly.
Early critics almost unanimously disparaged Cubist works as a descent into aesthetic anarchy. By fracturing objects into overlapping geometric planes and depicting multiple viewpoints simultaneously, the Cubists produced canvases that appeared illegible to audiences accustomed to Renaissance spatial logic. Critics argued that Cubism represented the total abandonment of objective reality in favor of pure, subjective abstraction. They contended that by stripping away recognizable forms, Picasso and Braque were signaling the death of representational art.
Yet, an examination of the theoretical underpinnings of Cubism reveals that the movement's founders were driven by an epistemological ambition rather than a destructive one. Picasso and Braque recognized that objects exist in space and time, and our true cognitive grasp of an object relies on an accumulation of multiple views. By flattening these multi-perspectival experiences onto a two-dimensional surface, they attempted to paint not merely what the eye sees in a frozen instant, but what the mind knows to be true about the object in its totality.
Thus, the critics who claimed that Cubism had severed the tie between art and objective reality fundamentally misapprehended the painters' project. Far from retreating into pure abstraction or abandoning the physical world, the early Cubists were ________
Which one of the following most logically completes the final sentence of the passage?
In the mid-twentieth century, formalist literary criticism championed the principle of the "affective fallacy"—the doctrine that a poem’s meaning is entirely independent of the emotional responses it elicits in the reader. Formalists argued that evaluating a text based on its psychological effects reduces literary analysis to mere impressionism, thereby stripping the discipline of its objective rigor. To the formalist, the text is a self-contained artifact; its meaning resides exclusively within its structural properties, such as irony, paradox, and internal tension, rather than in the subjective experience of the audience.
The subsequent ascent of reader-response theory in the 1970s challenged this paradigm by arguing that a text does not possess meaning a priori. Instead, theorists like Wolfgang Iser posited that meaning is an event—a dynamic negotiation between the text's structures and the reader's cognitive faculties. According to this view, the formalist attempt to isolate the text from the reader is not merely misguided but ontologically impossible, because the "text itself" remains an inert sequence of symbols until it is actualized by a perceiving consciousness.
Yet, contemporary post-critical theorists note a peculiar symmetry between these two ostensibly opposed camps. While formalists locate meaning in the autonomous text and reader-response theorists locate it in the temporal act of reading, both frameworks operate under the shared structuralist assumption that "meaning" is a singular, determinable entity that can be definitively located. By remaining trapped within this spatial metaphor of meaning as a tangible "thing" to be excavated or built—whether it is hiding in the architecture of the stanza or taking shape in the mind of the reader—both approaches inevitably...
Which of the following most logically completes the final sentence of the passage?
Analyze the jurisprudential argument below and provide the most logical term or short phrase to complete the author's final conclusion.
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However, the domain of tort law frequently abandons this principle in favor of 'strict liability.' Under strict liability regimes, such as those governing the manufacturing of consumer goods, a defendant can be held financially responsible for damages even if they exercised the utmost care and harbored no malicious intent. Critics argue this represents a regression, penalizing actors for sheer bad luck. If a meticulously inspected pipeline ruptures due to an unforeseeable anomaly, holding the company liable seems to divorce legal penalty from moral agency.
Yet, defending strict liability requires shifting the analytical framework from moral retribution to distributive justice. The legal system in these instances is not attempting to assess the character of the defendant, but rather to determine which of two innocent parties—the injured plaintiff or the non-negligent defendant—should bear the catastrophic cost of an accident. Since the enterprise engaged in the hazardous activity is generally better positioned to internalize these costs through insurance, the imposition of liability does not reflect a judgment of ethical failing. Therefore, the persistence of strict liability in modern tort law should not be viewed as an incoherent departure from the control principle, but rather as an acknowledgment that, in certain civil disputes, the equitable distribution of financial risk supersedes the assessment of .
The following excerpt from a philosophical treatise contains a missing word at its conclusion. Based on the logical progression of the argument, provide the most appropriate term to fill the blank.
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Critics of the DN model, however, consistently highlight the profound conceptual asymmetry often found in real-world scientific reasoning. To illustrate this deficiency, consider a classic meteorological scenario: one can accurately predict the onset of a severe storm by observing a sharp, rapid decline in a local barometer's reading. Because the drop in pressure and the impending storm are reliably correlated by natural laws, this predictive deduction perfectly satisfies the structural requirements of the DN model, thereby mistakenly qualifying as a genuine explanation of the storm itself. Yet, intuitively and scientifically, the barometer's mechanical behavior does not actually explain the ensuing meteorological event. Instead, both the falling barometer reading and the storm are simply concurrent, downstream effects of an unobserved underlying drop in atmospheric pressure. The core inadequacy of the DN model in this scenario stems from its exclusive, reductionist reliance on logical subsumption under observable regularities, a theoretical limitation which entirely blinds it to the specific, directional nature of physical influence. Consequently, if an epistemological framework is to successfully capture the true essence of scientific explanation without falling prey to such counterexamples, it must fundamentally reject the strict logical symmetry thesis and explicitly integrate the inherently asymmetric concept of .
The passage below ends with an incomplete sentence.
In recent years, the debate over linguistic relativity—the hypothesis that the structure of a language affects its speakers' worldview or cognition—has been reinvigorated by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies. Neo-Whorfians point to experiments demonstrating that speakers of languages with distinct lexical categories for light and dark blue (such as Russian) show heightened activation in language-processing regions of the left hemisphere when distinguishing between these shades, compared to English speakers who possess only a single overarching category. From this neurological discrepancy, proponents extrapolate that language inextricably dictates perceptual discrimination; in their view, the Russian speaker literally sees a different visual reality.
However, this interpretation fundamentally conflates the mediation of a cognitive task with the alteration of basic sensory processing. When subjects in these studies are forced to make rapid judgments, the brain naturally recruits the most efficient available circuits. For speakers with granular color lexicons, the left-hemisphere linguistic centers provide an expedient heuristic for categorization. Yet, when neuroscientists introduce a secondary verbal interference task—effectively occupying the language centers—the reaction time advantage of the Russian speakers evaporates, and their neural activation mirrors that of the English speakers, relying primarily on the right hemisphere's pre-linguistic visual cortex.
This reveals a crucial architectural feature of human cognition: linguistic categorization acts as a supplementary overlay rather than a structural foundation of perception. Language does not permanently reconfigure our visual hardware to perceive reality differently. Rather, it equips the brain with a parallel, specialized toolset that can be deployed when rapid categorization is advantageous. Therefore, one must conclude that the fMRI data championed by neo-Whorfians does not demonstrate that language alters our fundamental sensory apparatus, but only that _____________
Which of the following best completes the final sentence of the passage?
Since its formulation in the early twentieth century, the Neo-Darwinian synthesis has served as the foundational framework of evolutionary biology. This model asserts that evolutionary change is driven exclusively by random genetic mutations—alterations to the DNA sequence itself—which are subsequently acted upon by natural selection. Within this framework, environmental factors can influence an organism's phenotype during its lifetime, but acquired traits cannot be passed on to offspring; the germline remains strictly insulated from environmental vicissitudes.
In recent years, however, the burgeoning field of epigenetics has challenged this orthodox view. Epigenetic mechanisms, such as DNA methylation, regulate gene expression without altering the underlying nucleotide sequence. More provocatively, empirical evidence increasingly demonstrates that some of these environmentally induced epigenetic changes can be transmitted across generations. For instance, plants subjected to drought conditions can produce offspring that exhibit drought-resistant phenotypic traits, despite inheriting the exact same DNA sequence as the offspring of non-stressed control plants.
This phenomenon of transgenerational epigenetic inheritance has ignited fierce debate. Traditionalists, eager to preserve the primacy of the Neo-Darwinian model, argue that epigenetic changes are ephemeral. They maintain that because epigenetic marks are typically reset during embryogenesis, any transgenerational transmission is merely a short-term, "soft" inheritance that eventually reverts to the genetic baseline. Therefore, traditionalists contend, epigenetics requires no fundamental revision of evolutionary theory; it is simply a subsidiary mechanism of gene regulation ultimately controlled by the genetic sequence.
Yet, the traditionalist defense appears increasingly fragile in light of recent longitudinal research. Studies on nematodes have shown that environmentally induced epigenetic silencing can persist for up to fourteen generations, effectively driving adaptive population changes completely independent of DNA mutation. If such enduring epigenetic inheritance is discovered to be widespread across diverse taxa, the assumption that genetic sequence mutation is the sole engine of lasting evolutionary adaptation will be definitively falsified. It would therefore logically follow that __________.
Which one of the following most logically completes the argument in the passage?