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History of Lamarckism, an early theory of organic evolution. Biologists define an acquired characteristic as one that has developed in the course of the life of an individual in the somatic or body cells, usually as a direct response to some external change in the environment or through the use or disuse of a part.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Many sources postulate without much argumentation that Lamarck's evolutionary theory is "obviously incorrect". A classic example provided in such sources is the one with giraffes, in which Lamarck argued that the necks of these animals became long as a result of continually stretching to reach high foliage. This mechanism for adaptive change in ...
Nov 11, 2009 · Lamarckian Evolution. The year 2009 is the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jean-Bapteste Lamarck's Philosophie Zoologique and the 150th anniversary of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Lamarck believed that evolution is driven primarily by non-randomly acquired, beneficial phenotypic changes, in particular, those directly ...
- Eugene V Koonin, Yuri I Wolf
- 2009
Lamarckism. Lamarck argued, as part of his theory of heredity, that a blacksmith 's sons inherit the strong muscles he acquires from his work. [1] Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, [2] is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through ...
Lamarckism is also occasionally used to describe quasi-evolutionary concepts in societal contexts, though not by Lamarck himself. For example, the memetic theory of cultural evolution is sometimes described as a form of Lamarckian inheritance of nongenetic traits. Species and other taxa named by Lamarck
Darwinism recognizes natural variations within a population and suggests that advantageous variations are selected for over time. In contrast, Lamarckism does not emphasize natural variations as a driving force of evolution, focusing instead on the acquisition of traits during an individual's lifetime. Another significant difference lies in the ...
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Lamarckian inheritance is an idea that today is known mainly from textbooks, where it is used to as a historical contrast for our modern understanding of genetic inheritance, which began with the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in the late 1800s. Despite all he got wrong, Lamarck can be credited with envisioning evolutionary change for the first ...
