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In a way, all mutations in single-celled organisms that are inherited by daughter cells are acquired during the mother’s life-time, so they’d all meet some defi
by klmr 12y ago
In a way, all mutations in single-celled organisms that are inherited by daughter cells are acquired during the mother’s life-time, so they’d all meet some definition of Lamarckism. CRISPR isn’t that special in this regard.
Many evolutionary biologists also prefer not to call this Lamarckism – not because it would be entirely wrong, but because it is misleading to many lay people, who imagine that this would somehow be in conflict with Darwinian evolutionary theory of evolution by natural selection (it’s a hobby of many creationists to search for press releases mentioning Lamarckism to crow “ha! Darwin is refuted again!”). This choice isn’t a problem in practice because Lamarckism – unlike neo-Darwinism – doesn’t offer explanatory models which are essential to understand and reason about these processes.
- davidw 12y ago> Many evolutionary biologists also prefer not to call this Lamarckism Maybe that's why I got downvoted for - as it turns out - writing the exact thing the scientist said. It was just something that popped into my head.
- klmr 12y agoYeah, don’t understand the downvotes. It’s an interesting question, and the whole subject of Lamarckism is far from trivially obsolete. Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker contains a coherent and convincing argument why Lamarckism is actually wrong as an evolutionary explanation (in a nutshell, Lamarckism fundamentally cannot explain increase in complexity, as Darwinian evolution can, and it additionally doesn’t explain how adaptations of complex traits could possibly be acquired from scratch) – and this is a fundamental, epistemological objection which no amount of evidence could overturn. But few people refer to this reasoning when claiming that Lamarckism is “wrong”.