Question

Were Lamarck's ideas scientific?

How so? How might you test his hypothesis for evolution?

Answer 1

Lamark postulated that the characters acquired by an organism during its lifetime is passed on to its offspring in the immediate next generation. This phenomenon is also called as soft inheritance. This theory is however disproved as being non scientific because the changes that occur in an individual during its lifetime as a part of its adaptation dosent necessarily get passed on to the next generation. e.g. if a tall tree is cut down short and maintained short, then the next generation of offsprings produced by this tree would still be tall owing to its genes that code for tallness rather than the external trimming of the tree which is just a physical change. Lamark failed to describe the genetic basis of inheritance and the fract that the transfer of favourable genes to the offsprings is as a result of beneficial mutation within the genes and evolution is a slow and gradual process rather than a spontaneous one.