I've discussed this before. Lamarkian evolution is a theory that posits that "an organism can pass on characteristics it has acquired during its lifetime to its offspring." Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin were key figures in the development of evolution in the late 1700s, a theory Erasmus's grandson, Charles, would advance with the theory of natural selection. Lamarck's theories regarding use and disuse would be adopted by the younger darwin, but his ideas on 'soft inheritance' based on environmental factors were rejected more or less definitively by August Weismann in the 1880s. But what if Lamarck was right, and what if the impact of emvironment and experience can be passed down from one generation to the next? That's what this experiment suggests. "This work reveals that a flow of information can be transferred from the soma to the germline, escaping the principle of the Weismann barrier." Study on PLoS One.
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