Paul Kammerer's Experiments on Sea-squirts in the Early Twentieth Century
ثبت نشده
چکیده
In the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer, a zoologist working at the Vivarium in Vienna, Austria, experimented on sea-squirts (Ciona intestinalis [2]). Kammerer claimed that results from his experiments demonstrated that organisms could transmit characteristics that they had acquired in their lifetimes to their offspring. Kammerer conducted breeding experiments on sea-squirts and other organisms at a time when Charles Darwin [3]'s 1859 theory of evolution [4] lacked evidence to explain how offspring inherited traits from their parents. In 1809, zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in France theorized that living beings can inherit the features their parents or ancestors acquired during those ancestor's lifetime, a theory called the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Kammerer attempted to provide evidence for the theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, which constituted, he argued, the mechanics of evolution [4]. Kammerer claimed that his results could explain evolutionary processes through developmental phenomena.
منابع مشابه
Paul Kammerer's Experiments on Sea-squirts in the Early Twentieth Century
In the early twentieth century, Paul Kammerer, a zoologist working at the Vivarium in Vienna, Austria, experimented on sea-squirts (Ciona intestinalis [2]). Kammerer claimed that results from his experiments demonstrated that organisms could transmit characteristics that they had acquired in their lifetimes to their offspring. Kammerer conducted breeding experiments on sea-squirts and other org...
متن کاملThe Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics (1924), by Paul Kammerer
The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics is a book published in 1924, written by Paul Kammerer, who studied developmental biology in Vienna, Austria, in the early twentieth century. The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics summarizes Kammerer's experiments, and explains their significance. In his book, Kammerer aims to explain how offspring inherit traits from their parents. Some scholars...
متن کاملCiona
What is Ciona? Ciona is a genus of sea squirts or ascidians. The best known species are Ciona intestinalis from Europe, and Ciona savignyi from Japan; both are now invasive species in the USA. All Ciona species are marine and live attached to rocks or any submerged hard surfaces such as ropes, chains and boat hulls. What do they look like? At first sight, Ciona look like blobs of clear jelly, u...
متن کاملThe Role of the German Researchers in the Formation of Islamic Art Studies
In the beginning of the nineteenth century, with the increasing interest of the Europeans in the culture of the East, the first articles on the Islamic art and culture were appeared in German-speaking countries. In the mid nineteenth century, some entries in German encyclopedias were devoted to Islamic art, and from the end of the century, the first monographs on Islamic architecture and orname...
متن کاملPredictability of twentieth century sea-level rise from past data
The prediction of global sea-level rise is one of the major challenges of climate science. While process-based models are still being improved to capture the complexity of the processes involved, semi-empirical models, exploiting the observed connection between global-mean sea level and global temperature and calibrated with data, have been developed as a complementary approach. Here we investi...
متن کامل