what are your views on Lamark's theory- the use it or lose it theory.?

Question

do you think his theory can be argued to be partly true?

Answer 1

Lamarck's theory was on acquired traits--that if my parents needed to be stronger, their gametes would change to make a genetically stronger genome for their offspring. It is entirely false. There is no ability for the requirements within a lifetime to change the capacities of the genes in the gametes.

"Use it or lose it" is a mischaracterization, to an extent. Even in Darwinian evolution, there can be a degree of "use it or lose it" for a species, in that if it takes effort to maintain features, and those features are not used, then the features can become metabolically disfavored and thereby eliminated through natural selection. Since most advantageous traits still hold a cost on some level, the loss of the advantage means that the cost becomes innately disfavorable.

The biggest difference in Darwin versus Lamarck is that Darwin looked at a species as a whole, whereas Lamarck focused on individuals. Since evolution works at the species level, Lamarck missed the big picture, and the scale of his vision was far too narrow.

Answer 2

It isn't total crap -- if a feature is not useful for survival or reproduction, natural selection will have no tendency to retain it. There are fish in some caves in California that are never exposed to daylight; they are blind. But I don't know enough about that theory to say more about it. Professor Beatz's response, above, is sound.

Answer 3

It's crap...evolution doesn't work like that. Natural selection is the mechanism for evolution.

Lamarck proposed that acquired traits could be inherited, and that is obviously not the case. Otherwise we would have picked up all the disorders and conditions of our direct family members...(i.e. scars, baldness, missing limbs, diseases) right when we were born.