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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.
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. It is also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics or more recently soft inheritance.
Biology has largely rejected the idea that evolution is guided in any way, [88] [73] but the evolution of some features is indeed facilitated by the genes of the developmental-genetic toolkit studied in evolutionary developmental biology. An example is the development of wing pattern in some species of Heliconius butterfly, which have ...
Erasmus was an early proponent of what we now refer to as "adaptations", albeit through a different transformist mechanism – he argued that sexual reproduction could pass on acquired traits through the father’s contribution to the embryon. These changes, he believed, were mainly driven by the three great needs of life: lust, food, and security.
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to explain social behavior in terms of evolution.It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics.
In this metaphor, a canalised trait is illustrated as a valley (which he called a creode) enclosed by high ridges, safely guiding the phenotype to its "fate". Waddington claimed that canals form in the epigenetic landscape during evolution, and that this heuristic is useful for understanding the unique qualities of biological robustness.
The synthetic opioid is what’s known as a partial agonist — meaning there’s a limit to how much the medication can affect people who use it. In the U.S., buprenorphine is mainly sold under the brand name Suboxone, in which form it’s combined with naloxone, the drug that can reverse the effects of an overdose.
In evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect describes an effect of learned behaviour on evolution. James Mark Baldwin and others suggested that an organism's ability to learn new behaviours (e.g. to acclimatise to a new stressor) will affect its reproductive success and will therefore have an effect on the genetic makeup of its species through ...