Word: lamarck
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Geneticist Bentley Glass incited the fuss last winter when he suggested that human bodies began balding as soon as warm clothes ended the need for tufted torsos. Scoffing, one writer charged Glass with Lamarckianism, the discredited 1809 theory of French Naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, who argued that giraffe necks grew long because the animals preferred eating treetop leaves and that such acquired characteristics could be passed on to offspring. In rebuttal, Glass argued that man's use of fire as well as clothing changed his environment enough "to make hairiness an inconsequential feature, except on the more exposed parts...
...locked in a set of genes that usually bred true, but once in a while spontaneously "mutated" to produce a new characteristic that thereafter bred true and thus produced evolution's changes. This knowledge undercut the Lamarckian concept-named for Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744-1829)-that characteristics could be acquired in response to environment and become hereditary.* The cause of mutations remained a mystery...