SUGGESTED READING The gene illusion By DenisNoble
Weismann’s assertion that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is impossible was incorrect. He even wrote that it was a “necessary” idea, whether or not any experiments supported it. There was no experimental evidence for Weismann’s idea. He was therefore going against the Lamarckian idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics that Darwin had accepted and later expanded upon in his writings on heredity. He did so by inventing the Weismann Barrier, which he claimed protects the germ-line, the future eggs and sperm, from any influences of use-disuse features acquired by the organism during its lifetime. One of its founders, August Weismann, created the break with the ideas of Charles Darwin in 1883, just a year following Darwin’s death in 1882. That view is that acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, and that the organism itself has no active role in the evolution of the species. The Neo-Darwinist paradigm of evolutionary biology is almost defined by its view of inheritance. The side-lining any research into Lamarckian evolution has stifled the fruitful work of generations of researchers, limiting our understanding of how inheritance really works, argues Denis Noble. This paradigm is not only wrong, but untrue to Darwin’s theory of evolution which made room for Lamarck’s suggestion that acquired characteristics can also be inherited. The Neo-Darwinist paradigm maintains that natural selection is the sole driving force in evolution.
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