X-Nico

unusual facts about acquired characteristics



Evolution in Mendelian Populations

Studiers of evolution such as Lamarck and those who postulated the inheritance of acquired characteristics (e.g. Theodor Eimer and Edward Drinker Cope) were concerned with heredity and sought a link between one generation to the next.


see also

Inheritance of acquired characteristics

During the rule of Joseph Stalin in the USSR in the 1930s, the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics was central to the dogma put forth by Trofim Lysenko, president of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

The eclipse of Darwinism

As a consequence of the debate over the viability of neo-Lamarckism in the 1890s, James Mark Baldwin, Henry Fairfield Osborne and C. Lloyd Morgan all independently proposed a mechanism where new learned behaviors could cause the evolution of new instincts and physical traits through natural selection without resort to the inheritance of acquired characteristics.