Lamarck theory

Lamarckism is an evolutionary hypothesis based on the idea that physical changes in

animals over time, such as increased development of an organ or a portion due to increased
use, can be passed down to children. The idea, developed in 1809 by French naturalist
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, impacted evolutionary thought for the rest of the nineteenth
century.Most geneticists discredited Lamarckism in the 1930s, but some of its concepts
persisted in the Soviet Union until the mid-twentieth century.

Experimental evidence for and against Lamarckism has come conspicuously to the front on
several occasions. This evidence covers a great diversity of subjects and a variety of methods,
opening up new possibilities, some of which are far removed from the original contention.
One line of evidence goes back to the extraordinary results of Charles-Édouard
Brown-Séquard with guinea pigs. He believed that injury—localized or even more general—to
one of the parents caused in the offspring epilepsy or deformation and sloughing off of a limb
or toes. These effects were, he thought, sometimes transmitted to a few of the descendants.
The results have not been confirmed by subsequent work. It became obvious that, unless
work of this sort is done with inbred and pedigreed material, any conclusion is venturesome
in the extreme. Unless it can be demonstrated first that some of these peculiarities were not
present in the stock from the beginning, the results may be caused by germinal inheritance of
recessive characters or by indirect injury to the germ cells themselves.

C. C. Guthrie exchanged the ovaries of black and white fowls and concluded that a change

was brought about in them, but Charles Davenport’s later experiments showed that no such

effects are produced. Guthrie’s results were probably caused by impurity in the birds or by

regeneration of the original ovary. William Castle and J. C. Phillips transplanted the ovaries

of a black guinea pig into a white one. When mated to a white male, black offspring resulted.

John William Heslop-Harrison described the appearance of melanic (darkened) forms in the

moth Selenia after feeding on leaves treated with lead nitrate or manganese sulfate. The

evidence pointed to the conclusion that the treatment brought about the change and that the

change was directly on the germ cells.

Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were staunch Lamarckians and assumed that this type

of inheritance would guarantee the future improvement of the human race. Thus any Soviet

biologist who endorsed the doctrine was in a strong tactical position in the socialist

competition for status. From 1936 to 1948 a prolonged and bitter scientific controversy raged

in the Soviet Union. The final ruling on the dispute was a boon to the Communist
theoreticians—the Lamarckians were completely victorious. At the famous meeting of the

Lenin Agricultural Academy in 1948, the party line in genetics and evolution was drawn, and

Lamarckism, as part of the Soviet or Michurinist school, became official. Mendelism was

denounced, and Trofim Lysenko, the proponent of Michurinism, became the dictator of

Soviet biology. A number of Communists in Western Europe followed the Soviet directives

and sought to rehabilitate Lamarckism. During the next decade the discussions of

Lamarckism were political rather than scientific, and a great deal of confusion was naturally

introduced into the subject, some of it perhaps intentionally. A number of the published

polemics were intellectually dishonest, and the situation grew so bad that the American

Institute of Biological Sciences had to protest against the widespread misquoting of Western

biologists (1949).