A Superfluous Law of Evolution

Abstract

In this book we will and should not just ridicule Lamarck, after all, he was the first person to grasp the true meaning of the concept of the evolution of living things a long time before Darwin did. We can make the statement here that with reference to the crucial question of biological inheritance he was completely right even if in a very paradoxical way and even if it was somewhat against his real intentions. His so-called (individually) acquired characters can indeed be transmitted to the next generation and will do so permanently since these characteristics are not truly acquired, but rather the necessary information for them has always been present in the genes. That means nothing other than that what Lamarck postulated, that which has been argued about and has been steeped in legends right up to the present day—the inheritance of acquired characters—is not just confusing and troublesome but superfluous as well since the supposedly novel information concerned with this process already exists in the genes and therefore does not logically need to be stored there once more. For this reason, there is no more need, as erroneously assumed for Homo sapiens again and again, of the supposition that a very special kind of cultural or historical evolution could take place which is independent of and, in some cases, against the principles of biological evolution. The exact opposite is true because Lamarck postulated a mechanism which, strictly speaking, at any rate is possible within the framework of the Darwinian theory of mutation and selection and therefore has no more need of a separate explanation. What we can do with Lamarck’s concept of acquired characters with a good conscience is to delete the term “acquired” since learning and other apparently new acquisitions have nothing to do with really new acquisitions in an evolutionary sense.

The Law of the Inheritence of acquired characters: Everything that the individuals gain or lose through the influence of the circumstances which its race has been exposed to for a long time, and consequently through the influence of the predominant use or continuous nonuse of an organ, is passed on to the offspring by reproduction provided that the acquired changes are common to both sexes or the producers of these individuals.

Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck