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An acquired characteristic is a non-heritable change in a function or structure of a living organism caused after birth by disease, injury, accident, deliberate modification, variation, repeated use, disuse, misuse, or other environmental influence. Acquired traits are synonymous with acquired characteristics.
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 use or disuse during its lifetime.
Evolutionary progress as a tree of life. Ernst Haeckel, 1866 Lamarck's two-factor theory involves 1) a complexifying force that drives animal body plans towards higher levels (orthogenesis) creating a ladder of phyla, and 2) an adaptive force that causes animals with a given body plan to adapt to circumstances (use and disuse, inheritance of acquired characteristics), creating a diversity of ...
Derived traits show significant differences from the original "primitive" condition of an ancestral trait found in the common ancestor, implying that the trait has undergone extensive adaptation during the clade's evolutionary history to reach its derivative condition. Both terms are relative: a derived trait for one clade may be an ancestral ...
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 29 December 2024. Science of genes, heredity, and variation in living organisms This article is about the general scientific term. For the scientific journal, see Genetics (journal). For a more accessible and less technical introduction to this topic, see Introduction to genetics. For the Meghan Trainor ...
This glossary of biology terms is a list of definitions of fundamental terms and concepts used in biology, the study of life and of living organisms.It is intended as introductory material for novices; for more specific and technical definitions from sub-disciplines and related fields, see Glossary of cell biology, Glossary of genetics, Glossary of evolutionary biology, Glossary of ecology ...
Character evolution is the process by which a character or trait (a certain body part or property of an organism) evolves along the branches of an evolutionary tree. Character evolution usually refers to single changes within a lineage that make this lineage unique from others.
For example, having eye color is a character of an organism, while blue, brown and hazel versions of eye color are traits. The term trait is generally used in genetics, often to describe phenotypic expression of different combinations of alleles in different individual organisms within a single population, such as the famous purple vs. white ...