The first physical body, inherited from father and mother, is not the child's own form but a model the etheric body works from, and then discards.
The Inherited Body as Model in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's account of what a child's first physical body actually is: not a finished inheritance but a working pattern. In Human Values in Education (GA 310), given at Arnheim in July 1924, the body prepared by father and mother out of the forces of heredity is cast off across the first seven years, serving only as a model from which the etheric body builds a second, individual physical body, completed at the change of teeth. The etheric body works here as a sculptor. A strong etheric body rejects the model and reshapes the inherited form; a weak one copies it faithfully, which is why family likeness looks as though it persists past the seventh year. Steiner drew a teaching consequence: a face read after the change of teeth shows what the child has made, not only what was given.
The inherited body as model names the status Steiner gave to the physical body a child arrives with. Father and mother supply it, and the child does not yet inhabit it as their own. Across seven years the etheric body copies, corrects, or overrules that pattern and raises a second physical body in its place. Heredity, on this reading, sets the first draft rather than the finished text.
In Steiner's Own Words
To begin with man receives his first physical body, if I may so express myself, out of the forces of heredity. This is prepared for him by his father and mother. In the course of the first 7 years of life this physical body is cast off, but during this time it serves as a model from which the etheric body can build up the second body. Today people make the things confronting them so frightfully simple. If a ten-year-old child has a nose like his father's they say it is inherited. But it is not so simple as this, for as a matter of fact the nose is only inherited up to the time of the change of teeth. For if the ether body is so strong that it rejects the model of the inherited nose, then in the course of the first seven years its shape will change.
What it Means Today
Steiner's objection in 1924 was that heredity had been made too simple. A nose is said to be inherited, and the matter is treated as closed. Molecular heredity research arrived at the same objection from the other side. In November 2008 the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published work by Bastiaan Heijmans, Elmar Tobi, and L. H. Lumey on Dutch adults who had been conceived during the Hunger Winter of 1944 and 1945, when the western Netherlands was under famine. Six decades later those individuals still carried measurably less methylation at the imprinted IGF2 gene than their own unexposed siblings. The DNA sequence was the same in both groups. What differed was how the inherited text was being read, and that had been set in a few months at the beginning of life, then held for a lifetime.
Thalira synthesis: the Hunger Winter cohort does not verify Steiner, it clears the ground he was arguing on, since it shows the earliest stretch of a life deciding how binding an inheritance stays.
For a parent or a teacher the consequence is patience. A face at four is not a verdict. Steiner's advice in the same Arnheim lecture was that teachers take up modelling in clay, since a hand that has shaped form from the inside reads a changing child more honestly than one that has only measured.
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