The \u201cLamarckian\u201d model was\u00a0actually espoused by Darwin<\/strong><\/em>\u00a050 years after Lamarck, but that part of Darwin\u2019s legacy has been airbrushed out of history. The super-Lamarckian possibility was theorized 20 years ago in a landmark\u00a0book by JohnJoe McFadden<\/a>.<\/p>\n Thanks for reading Unauthorized Science! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Science that is currently mainstream holds that<\/p>\n In this series of essays, I will<\/p>\n Your body is really good at learning. Whatever it is that you persist in trying to do, day after day over a period of time, your body gets better at it, stronger, more coordinated, more flexible, more skilled or versatile. And conversely those potential strengths which you do not exercise will atrophy, and you lose them.<\/p>\n You also know that you can\u2019t pass these strengths and skills on to your children. They have to acquire them anew with their own effort and their own habits.\u00a0Whatever is innate in your own heritage can be passed along with your genes, but whatever you have acquired or developed must be developed afresh by each new generation<\/strong><\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it be great if we could get past this limitation? Imagine if you could bust your gut in Pilates class knowing that it wasn\u2019t just your own abs you were strengthening, but a legacy you could pass to future generations? Imagine if your children could pick up where you left off developing their health and their skills and their coordination and reflexes, each generation building on the last to reach for higher and higher goals.<\/p>\n And what a boon for evolution, this would be \u2013 if it were real!<\/p>\n Here\u2019s a\u00a01999 article<\/a>\u00a0which assumes that there is no such thing as Lamarckian inheritance, and the author creates a mathematical model purporting to show that Lamarckian evolution isn\u2019t noticeably more efficient than straight natural selection. I think that Hayes\u2019s conclusion is wrong, though he\u2019s an engaging writer and talented computer modeler. The beneficial mutations in his model\u00a0without<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0Lamarckian inheritance are assumed to be unrealistically common.<\/p>\n Since this article came out, the reality of (temporary) Lamarckian\u00a0epigenetic<\/strong><\/em>\u00a0inheritance has become well-established. Could it be that permanent, Lamarckian modification of the genome is also a reality?<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how the story is still taught to this day:<\/strong><\/p>\n In\u00a01809<\/a>, Jean Baptiste Lamarck\u2019s theory of evolution was that the training and habituation that our bodies undergo when we exercise our muscles, when we endure heat and cold, when we use our brains to solve problems \u2013 these abilities acquired in a lifetime affect offspring, so that they are born better able to cope with whatever it is that the parents have coped with during their lives. Thus the environment and an individual\u2019s response to it help to shape the character of the next generation, and evolution proceeds efficiently in the directions of those qualities that are required in the environment, and those choices which the parents have made during their lifetimes.<\/p>\n Fifty years later, Darwin\u2019s theory was that offspring differ from their parents in ways that are purely random. The direction of evolution is controlled indirectly, because some of those offspring are better able to survive and to reproduce than others.<\/p>\n The difference is whether genetic variation is\u00a0random<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0directed<\/em>\u00a0by the environment and life choices of the parents. Darwin said\u00a0random<\/em>. Lamarck said\u00a0directed<\/em>.<\/p>\n In the 1890s,\u00a0August Weismann<\/a>\u00a0conducted an experiment in which he cut off the tails of rats and then measured the tail lengths of their progeny. He continued, cutting off the tails of 20 generations of rats, and yet each generation was born with tails just as long as the last generation. This was taken to be a definitive refutation of Lamarckian inheritance, and scientists everywhere have developed the theory of Darwin, and reserved the story of Lamarck as a morality tale about discredited science.<\/p>\n If Jean-Baptiste had been alive to defend his theory he might have said that\u00a0developing<\/em>\u00a0a trait by using the neural pathways and strengthening the muscles is quite different from hacking off a body part. What Weismann demonstrated had little to do with the heart of Lamarck\u2019s theory.<\/p>\n But it wasn\u2019t Weismann\u2019s experiments alone that gave Lamarckism a bad name. Beginning in the 1880s, Austrian\u00a0Paul Kammerrer<\/a>\u00a0set out to prove the reality of acquired genetic inheritance, and was caught in scientific fraud. In the 1930s,\u00a0Trofim Lysenko<\/a>\u00a0and the Soviet propaganda machine promoted Lamarckism not so much as a science but a political ideology. Communist social practice was destined to change the core of human nature.<\/p>\n The coffin of Lamarckism was sealed by Francis Crick, who not only discovered DNA as the repository of genetic information, but articulated in 1958 the\u00a0Central Dogma of Molecular Biology<\/a>: Information flows from DNA \u21d2 Messenger RNA \u21d2 Proteins, always in that direction. In 1958, there were no mechanisms known by which proteins could feed back to modify DNA, and Crick boldly speculated that no such mechanisms existed.<\/p>\n Random variation is extremely inefficient. The big problem is that two or three or even dozens of genes need to change before a new trait can be acquired. Suppose that a few mutations appear that are steps in the right direction \u2013 how are those mutated genes to be preserved while waiting for other mutations that will complete the set and create something that actually offers some selective advantage? Imagine evolving a hand. First, perhaps, the bone structure you need for a hand randomly appears, but without nerves and muscles, it has no use, no functional advantage. So the stepping stone disappears from the gene pool before the rest of the adaptation can appear, by random mutation, and make something that is actually useful.<\/p>\n This problem has been called \u201cirreducible complexity\u201d by the Creationists, Christian critics of Darwinian evolution. Evolutionary scientists, under siege from the Creationists, have decided to \u201ctake no prisoners\u201d, and so they deny there is any merit to this criticism, and pretend that Darwin\u2019s theory of evolution works just fine as is. But the honest truth is that the Creationists have hit upon the weakest assumption of evolutionary theory as understood by mainstream scientists today. \u201cCreation science\u201d is in fact not a science at all, but a decision to give up on scientific investigation and accept without question that \u201cthat\u2019s the way God made it\u201d. This is not a path I find appealing; nevertheless, Creationist criticism of the version of evolution based on one-mutation-at-a-time is actually quite well-founded.<\/p>\n Evolutionary scientists have always taken it on faith that there is a mechanistic explanation for the origin of every organ, every system, every biological function that we observe. We have hoped and assumed that the more we learn about the workings of the body, the clearer would be the pathway by which it might have evolved one-mutation-at-a-time, with each incremental step offering some selective advantage that would hold it in place while waiting for random mutation to come up with the other steps. But in fact, the more we know, the more puzzling cases we see of \u201cirreducible complexity\u201d which strains our imagination to account for a plausible evolutionary pathway.<\/p>\n Darwin knew this. Even in the first edition of The Origin of Species (1859), he admitted a role for the habits of the parents in determining the traits of the offspring. This idea was coded in the words \u201cuse and disuse\u201d in the last paragraph of the book:<\/p>\n It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Through the development of Darwin\u2019s thought after The Origin, the idea of Lamarckian inheritance gradually gained ground. In 1876 he wrote in a letter (published after his death):<\/p>\n In my opinion, the greatest error which I have committed has been not allowing sufficient weight to the direct action of the environments, i.e. food, climate, etc., independently of natural selection. . . . When I wrote the \u201cOrigin,\u201d and for some years afterwards, I could find little good evidence of the direct action of the environment; now there is a large body of evidence. Savor the irony that the version of Darwinism that is best accepted today is ultra-orthodox, far more narrow than beliefs and writings of Charles Darwin. If Darwin were submitting his papers to the journal\u00a0Evolution<\/em>\u00a0today, he would receive a patronizing letter of rejection, criticizing his unfocused thinking, and warning him that Lamarckian inheritance is not a credible mechanism, and that he must re-frame his theory in terms of known, validated laws of inheritance.<\/p>\n This kind of censorship in the name of scientific orthodoxy is bad enough when it is well-grounded in empirical science. But in the case of Lamarckian inheritance, it is the mainstream scientists who have missed the boat.<\/p>\n Is it reasonable to expect that Darwinian evolution by natural selection alone could have produced the variety of robust individuals, species, and entire ecosystems that we see in the incredibly short space of just 4 billion years, with only a billion cubic kilometers for experimentation?<\/p>\n This is a compelling question to which different scientists have very different answers. We might wish that modeling and experiments could resolve the question, but the fact is that it\u2019s hard to get funding for experiments that have a billion-year timeline, and the processes we would wish to model (involving fantastically low probabilities over vast numbers of organisms and huge time periods) require computer resources that we can\u2019t even conceive.<\/p>\n Darwin himself was puzzled by some questions for which he invoked a \u201cCreator\u201d complete with capital \u201cC\u201d. These included<\/p>\n We now know some things that Darwin didn\u2019t know.\u00a0Question #1 has become more poignant<\/a>\u00a0the more we experiment toward a biochemistry of self-reproducing molecules. Today\u2019s evolutionists have given up on Question #2, taking sex as a given, or calling it the\u00a0Masterpiece of Nature<\/a>. Question #3 found a partial answer in Mendelian inheritance, but in computer models, (even with sex), diversity collapses faster than what we see in nature. And Question #4\u00a0requires group selection<\/a>, in defiance of contemporary neo-Darwinists, though not necessarily of Darwin himself.<\/p>\n Some biologists see plausibility as a big problem, have described the problem and proposed solutions.\u00a0The Plausibility of Life<\/a>\u00a0by Marc Kirchner and John Gerhart.\u00a0Evolution in Four Dimensions<\/a>\u00a0by Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb. Others claim that standard neo-Darwinism is all we need.\u00a0Climbing Mount Improbable<\/a>\u00a0by Richard Dawkins.\u00a0Darwin\u2019s Dangerous Idea<\/a>, by Daniel Dennett.<\/p>\n\n
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\n<\/div>\nUse it or lose it<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nHere are some facts that don\u2019t fit with that story:<\/h2>\n
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\n\u2014 From a letter to Moritz Wagner, 1876<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\nThe plausibility of evolution<\/h2>\n
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