Inheritance of Acquired Characters

Waddington's widget: Hsp90 and the inheritance of acquired characters.

Conrad Waddington published an influential model for evolution in his 1942 paper, Canalization of Development and Inheritance of Acquired Characters. In this classic, albeit controversial, paper, he proposed that an unknown mechanism exists that conceals phenotypic variation until the organism is stressed. Recent studies have proposed that the highly conserved chaperone Hsp90 could function as ...

Lamarck, evolution, and the inheritance of acquired characters.

Scientists are not always remembered for the ideas they cherished most. In the case of the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, his name since the end of the nineteenth century has been tightly linked to the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters. This was indeed an idea that he endorsed, but he did not claim it as his own nor did he give it much thought. He took pride instead in adv...

Evidence , Mechanisms and Models for the Inheritance of Acquired Characters

Several different types of epigenetic inheritance system enable alternative functional states to be maintained in cell lineages that have identical DNA sequences. Both random and guided (directed) epigenetic variations can be transmitted by these systems, and lead to heritable modifications in cell structure and function. Although it is usually assumed that epigenetic inheritance does not occur...

Lamarck’s Two Legacies: A 21st-century Perspective on Use-Disuse and the Inheritance of Acquired Characters

Lamarck has left many legacies for future generations of biologists. His best known legacy was an explicit suggestion, developed in the Philosophie zoologique (PZ), that the effects of use and disuse (acquired characters) can be inherited and can drive species transformation. This suggestion was formulated as two laws, which we refer to as the law of biological plasticity and the law of phenoty...

Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics Revisited