![]() They have now been proven to communicate such acquired characteristics as metabolic disorders, and sexual preferences, to the germ-line via small regulatory RNA molecules. The small vesicles, called exosomes or extracellular vesicles, poured out by all cells of the body can function precisely as Darwin’s idea proposed. Modern physiology has vindicated Darwin’s idea. ![]() In his 1868 book, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, he postulated the existence of tiny particles derived from the cells of the body that could transfer use-disuse memory to the germ line. For, during the last decade of his life, he worked assiduously with the young physiologist George Romanes on experiments designed to test his theory for how the inheritance of acquired characteristics could occur. Had Darwin lived, we can be sure he would have promptly disagreed. SUGGESTED READING The gene illusion By Denis Noble 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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