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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.
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.
The inheritance of acquired characteristics (also called the theory of adaptation or soft inheritance) was rejected by August Weismann in the 1880s [Note 3] when he developed a theory of inheritance in which germ plasm (the sex cells, later redefined as DNA), remained separate and distinct from the soma (the rest of the body); thus, nothing ...
The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication is a book by Charles Darwin that was first published in January 1868.. A large proportion of the book contains detailed information on the domestication of animals and plants but it also contains in Chapter XXVII a description of Darwin's theory of heredity which he called pangenesis.
Heredity, also called inheritance or biological inheritance, is the passing on of traits from parents to their offspring; either through asexual reproduction or sexual reproduction, the offspring cells or organisms acquire the genetic information of their parents.
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 15 February 2025. 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 ...
Further research of this heritability of acquired characteristics developed into, in part, the modern field of epigenetics. Darwin himself had noted that "the existence of free gemmules is a gratuitous assumption"; by some accounts in modern interpretation, gemmules may be considered a prescient mix of DNA, RNA, proteins, prions, and other ...
Pseudoplesiomorphy – a trait that cannot be identified as either a plesiomorphy or an apomorphy that is a reversal. [15] Reversal – a loss of derived trait present in ancestor and the reestablishment of a plesiomorphic trait. Convergence – independent evolution of a similar trait in two or more taxa. Apomorphy – a derived trait.