Abstract
In his target article ‘The Illusions of the Modern Synthesis’, Denis Noble argues that the Modern Synthesis is undermined by the major findings of molecular biology. The supposed falsification of Weisman’s Barrier and of standard interpretations of Francis Crick’s Central Dogma has paved the way for Lamarckian forms of inheritance which are prohibited by that theory of evolution. I argue that August Weismann postulated two barriers against two kinds of Lamarckism. However, his second barrier was speculative. It was made more concrete through the articulation of Francis Crick’s Central Dogma. These two barriers still preclude Lamarckism or Lamarckian forms of inheritance, as understood by Weismann.
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Notes
This claim is a classic reaction to Weismann’s famous experiments with mice: he cut off their tail without transgenerational effect. The idea that these experiments disproved “what the French biologist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, thought” (Noble, 2021: 8) is an illusion because Lamarck did not believe in the inheritance of mutilations. However, contrary to what Noble suggests, Weismann’s experiment was not intended as an experimentum crucis against Lamarckism. Weismann distinguished between three kinds of somatically acquired characters: functional features that were acquired through the use or disuse of specific body parts or organs, features that were acquired through the influence of the environment and mutilations. His experiments merely suggested that mutilations were not inherited, they did not prove that the other two categories of acquired somatic characters could not be inherited. Lastly, as Mayr (1982: 699-700) points out, Weismann’s main weapon against Lamarckism was showing that the physiological mechanisms by which it was supposed to operate, did not exist (or that they were not very plausible).
As Jablonka and Lamb (2005: 38) point out: “Contrary to common belief, Weismann did not believe in the complete segregation and continuity of the germ cells; he knew from his own work on hydroids that germ cells can originate from somatic tissues quite late in development.”
Noble’s claim that the MS developed from a fusion between, on the one hand, the neo-Darwinism of Alfred Russel Wallace and August Weismann and, on the other hand, Mendelian genetics (or between the Weismann Barrier and Mendelian genetics) is not correct. Neo-Darwinism and Mendelism were never fused. Historically, the MS developed from the population genetic approach of evolution (Tanghe et al., 2021).
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Tanghe, K.B. Weismann’s Barrier and Crick’s Barrier Still Preclude Two Kinds of Lamarckism. Biosemiotics 14, 675–682 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09464-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09464-6