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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.
Waddington called the effect he had seen "genetic assimilation". His explanation was that it was caused by a process he called "canalization".He compared embryonic development to a ball rolling down a slope in what he called an epigenetic landscape, where each point on the landscape is a possible state of the organism (involving many variables).
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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.
Genetic variation can be identified at many levels. Identifying genetic variation is possible from observations of phenotypic variation in either quantitative traits (traits that vary continuously and are coded for by many genes, e.g., leg length in dogs) or discrete traits (traits that fall into discrete categories and are coded for by one or a few genes, e.g., white, pink, or red petal color ...