Word: lamarckianism
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...this seems confusing and ethereal, it is for good reason. Still, these theories do have some empirical implications, which Sheldrake discusses towards the end of the book. The fields supposedly operate not only through space but also through time (hence the title). They provide an extragenetic mechanism for neo-Lamarckian inheritance, as ancestors long-dead "resonate" with their descendants. He explains tradition as the culture of the past resonating with that of the present, and memory as a 10-year-old self resonating with an adult self. In Sheldrake's eyes, we are surrounded at every moment by a parliament...
...self-perpetuating logic, a disdain for accepted thought, no specific scientific references, no index and no bibliography. Kiss Maerth, who is described as a man born in Yugoslavia who spent many years in a Chinese Buddhist monastery and now lives at Lake Como, seems never to have heard of Lamarckian biology, T.D. Lysenko's bogus theory that Communism could be inherited as an acquired characteristic, or even about the lowly planarian worms, which were forced to cannibalize their siblings in hope that their modest laboratory lessons would be passed on to future generations...
...than others-"survival of the fittest." Geneticists later concluded that inheritance was 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...
...part in a Philadelphia symposium on "The Factors of Organic Evolution." He was then only 33 and rather bashful about appearing before his elders, but, being urged, he accepted. He was pitted in debate against a booming bigwig, Professor Edward Drinker Cope of University of Pennsylvania, who advanced the Lamarckian view that acquired characteristics (e.g., muscular development or manual skill) can be inherited. Conklin defended the opposite view, boldly stated that inherited characteristics are determined solely by the germ plasm. In the course of time biology gave him the palm over Bigwig Cope. Today almost all top-notch biologists have...
...lower jaw to scoop food from swamps. The African elephant developed its upper tusks to uproot trees for their tender top leaves. This Osborn theory opposes the Darwinian theory that new types develop from accidental variations of which only those survive which are best adapted to their environment; the Lamarckian theory that new types inherit the changed habits of ancestors; the "vitalistic" theory that a force for change occurs within the germ cells...