Lamarckism

Lamarckism, also called Lamarckian inheritance, is the idea proposed by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that it acquired through use or disuse during its own lifetime. The idea stands in contrast to Darwinian natural selection, although Darwin himself accepted some heritability of use and disuse and developed his own theory of pangenesis to account for it. From the 1860s onward researchers looking for evidence of Lamarckian inheritance found that their results could be explained by other mechanisms, such as contamination of experiments, or were later shown to be fraudulent, and Mendelian genetics eventually displaced the idea within mainstream biology. More recent work in epigenetics has identified mechanisms such as transgenerational epigenetic inheritance that show a limited form of the effect Lamarck proposed, although whether these mechanisms are truly Lamarckian remains disputed among scientists.