Harry Schwartz Eats the World

Lamarckian Genetics

In the high and far-off times of the 1790s, O Best Beloved, there lived along the shores of the great green greasy Seine River a biologist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

Lamarck was one of the first scientists to explain the differentiation of species by evolution. In his version, traits that parents acquired during their lives were passed along to their children. Thus, a giraffe that had to stretch to eat the leaves at the tops of trees passed down its lengthened neck to its offspring, and a talented human musician who practiced very hard would have more musically-inclined children.

This was some pretty clever thinking for the time, and fit in neatly with the later Victorian passion for self-improvement. Once Mendel & Co. determined the actual mechanism of genetics, though, the whole thing kinda broke.

Some of Lamarck’s ideas were revived in the 1930s in the Soviet Union as Lysenkoism, the theory of genetics upon which the USSR based its agricultural research. Famines resulted. =(

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 7:51 pm and is filed under animals, history, science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.