Comment on Lamarck moment

flyos@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• Apepollo11@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  He was. He just didn’t get the mechanism behind it right.

  A crude way of explaining Lamarckian evolution would be to look at giraffes. Lamarckism suggests that because an animal that spends much if it’s life stretching its neck to reach food ends up with a slightly longer neck. This trait is then passed down to children, who might spend much of their lives stretching their necks, making them slightly longer. And so on.

  He correctly identified that speciation occurs over many many generations, as a result of incremental changes.

  What Darwin did was to recognise the actual mechanism behind speciation - Natural Selection. Darwin was aware of and built on Lamarck’s work.

  Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.

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  • MalReynolds@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Weirdly, within the last thirty years, we’ve realised that the truth is not so clear cut. Epigenetic changes do occur as a result of the environment and are hereditary. While genes are still the main drivers of evolution, these epigenetic changes affect gene expression.

    Nature doesn’t leave anything on the table if it is remotely possible (billions of years will do that) and learned experience transmitted to offspring is way too juicy. I would be wholly unsurprised at the existence of a mechanism for writing this to DNA, perhaps enhancing the chance of copy number increase or similar.

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    • tomiant@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I’m with you on this one, I’d like to think that consciousness has something to do with it (for some definition of consciousness). Being able to process one’s surroundings and pass that information on into genes would be an extremely advantageous trait to have. Clearly things are not that simple, but I like to think there’s something to it.

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      • iSeth@lemmy.ml ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Butterflies remember being caterpillars somehow.

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  • lugal@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Lamarck wasn’t the first to come up with a theory of evolution and Darwin wasn’t right about the mechanism.

    Charles Darwin’s grandfather already had a theory of evolution and arguably, even he wasn’t the first.

    Charles Darwin wasn’t aware of genes. His idea of inheritance was basically the same as Lamarck’s. Only when Darwin and Mendel were combined, the “modern” theory of evolution was born, the “new synthesis” or something it’s called.

    The reason we single out these two isn’t that one was first and one was right, neither was. It’s because of the Great Man of History idea. We could talk about Wallace, how he was on the same path as Darwin but Darwin published first to outcompete him. But we don’t because we like to believe in great thinkers who singlehandedly changed the world.

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  • flyos@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I was merely jesting at the refusal we (the French) had of Darwinian evolution, because we chauvinistically preferred Lamarck. The text on the statue is basically this: the (childish) attempt of French biologists at making Lamarck rather than Darwin the true hero of the story.

    But, yeah if I need to support my take, I don’t think he can be called the “father of the doctrine of evolution”. First, because “evolution” is a term strongly associated with Darwinism, rather than “transformism”. The former is a radical version of the latter, whereby all species come from a common ancestor, which is not at all Larmack’s view. Second, Lamarck wasn’t the first transformist, many other people suggested species could (like Buffon, although he was very careful about it, or… Erasmus Darwin). What he was, certainly, was the first to provide an auto-cohesive transformist theory. The problem was, his theory was most just that, auto-cohesive. Lamarck lacked Darwin drive to anchor his theory firmly into biological facts, and Darwin actually had little consideration for Lamarck’s work because of that. He certainly didn’t “build” on Lamarck, this is has been made quite clear by historians. This would be my third point.

    A last thing is that I see a lot Lamarck associated with inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he’s not. Or, rather, it’s nothing specific to Lamarck. It was a very common thing to assume at the time, and Darwin’s theory of heredity (pangenesis) was compatible with inheritance of acquired characteristics. And Lamarck’s theory bears little with modern epigenetics (or rather this idea of environmentally-induced epigenetic inheritance which we call “neo-lamarckism” for reasons beyond me), because it was not the environment that induces change for Lamarck, but an internal driving force akin to a habit.

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