Sunday, August 21, 2011

Darwin's Theory Vs. Lamarck's Ideas Of Evolution

Jean-BaptisteLamarck proposed that organisms could pass on to their offspring traits that where acquired during their lifetime. This has come to be known as inheritance of acquired characteristics.

On the other hand Charles Darwin recognized the main mechanism for evolution: Natural Selection. Natural Selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population and unfavorable heritable traits become less common, due to differential reproduction. That is: given a certain population, those individuals who are more fit to the selective pressure(s) by their habitat (in a given time and space) will leave more descendants than those less fit

In short, Lamarck thought that changes were acquired during the life of a parent organism and then transmitted to their offspring while Darwin deducted that changes were already present in the parent organisms, and that the best adapted to that situation survived to breed, which meant that those genetic changes become common in the following generations


Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_are_the_differences_between_Darwin's_theory_of_Evolution_and_Lamarck's_theory_of_Evolution#ixzz1VijtrisN

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