The theory of the inheritance of acquired traits was formulated by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It states that the traits an organism acquires during its lifetime in correspondence to its environment will be transmitted to its offspring. According to this theory giraffes have long necks because shorter giraffes spent their lives stretching their necks to reach their food, foliage, and they passed on this trait to their young, creating over generations the modern giraffe. This theory, however, was never substantiated scientifically (and in fact it was disproven by genetics): it was replaced by Darwin's theory of natural selection. Lamarck believed that species changed of their own free will and if a limb or body part was not used, the body part could completely fall off or disappear if the animal wished it to. Theory has a number of distinct meanings, depending on the context. ... Natural history is an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. ... Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (August 1, 1744 - December 28, 1829) was a major 19th century French naturalist, who was one of the first to use the term biology in its modern sense. ... In biology and ecology, an organism (in Greek organon = instrument) is an assembly of organs that influence each other in such a way that they function as a more or less stable whole and have properties of life. ... Binomial name Giraffa camelopardalis Linnaeus, 1758 The Giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis) is an even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest of all land living animal species. ... Genetics (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. ... Charles Darwin in 1854, five years before he published The Origin of Species. ... Natural selection is a process by which biological populations are altered over time, as a result of the propagation of heritable traits that affect the capacity of individual organisms to survive and reproduce. ...

Evidence

In the 1920s, Harvard University researcher William McDougall, studied the abilities of rats to correctly solve mazes. He found that children of rats that had learned the maze were able to run it faster. The first rats would get it wrong 165 times before being able to run it perfectly each time, but after a few generations it was down to 20. McDougall attributed this was due to some sort of Lamarckian evolutionary process. Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... There have been several people called William McDougall For the Canadian politician, see William McDougall (politician) For the British psychologist, see William McDougall (psychologist) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... Species 50 species; see text *Several subfamilies of Muroids include animals called rats. ... Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (August 1, 1744 - December 28, 1829) was a major 19th century naturalist, who was one of the first to use the term biology in its modern sense. ...

Genetic Disproof

There are many formulations of the genetic disproof, but all have roughly the same structure as the following:

(1) Acquired traits do not affect an organisms genome. (2) Only the genome is passed to the offspring. (3) Therefore, acquired traits cannot be passed to the offspring. In biology the genome of an organism is the whole hereditary information of an organism that is encoded in the DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA). ... In biology the genome of an organism is the whole hereditary information of an organism that is encoded in the DNA (or, for some viruses, RNA). ...

While this proof may be logically valid, it suffers from the material fallacy of begging the question, since no one who believes in inheritance of acquired traits would believe both assumptions. In psychology a conclusion is said to be valid, if and only if, it is based on true premises. ... The term Fallacy denotes any mistaken statement used in an argument. ... In logic, begging the question is the term for a type of fallacy occurring in deductive reasoning in which the proposition to be proved is assumed implicitly or explicitly in one of the premises. ...

See also

• Lamarckism
• Morphogenetic field