When scientists see the term “Lamarckian evolution”, the usual reaction is that it references a long-debunked theory. But that might be changing.

Lamarck was an accomplished biologist living in the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries. He was an expert on the taxonomy of invertebrates and was widely regarded as a botanist. He also wrote about physics, chemistry, and meteorology.

He is best remembered for his publication of Philosophie Zoologique in 1809 in which he lays out his theory of evolution. He describes two laws of nature. The first is that animals develop or lose physical traits depending on usage of those traits. For example, giraffes got their long necks because they constantly stretched to reach high leaves in trees during their lifetime. The second law states that these acquired changes during a lifetime are passed on to offspring, i.e., inherited. These two laws explain how species evolve by continual adaptation to their environment and eventually branch off into new species once the changes become large enough—so-called Lamarckian evolution.

There were other interesting aspects of his theories. He believed that there was some natural force that drove organisms toward increased complexity that was set apart from the usage law. The wide variety of organisms found in nature was because different life forms appeared spontaneously at different times.  Thus they do not all evolve from a common ancestor.  When gaps seemed to appear in the fossil record in certain lineages, he attributed that to a failure in finding all the relevant fossils. His theory clearly assumed gradual and continual evolution, but that evolution was always driven toward greater complexity.

Lamarckian evolution was largely debunked when the works of Gregor Mendel and others later demonstrated that inheritance occurred according to discreet rules of dominant and recessive inheritance rather than through acquired characteristics. Further discoveries in genetics during the 20^th century further put the notion of inheritance through acquired characteristics to rest.

BUT, Lamarck has gotten a bit of a reprieve in the 21^st century. By 2003, we had completed the Human Genome Project, which told us a lot about our genome and genes, but little about the epigenome. Since then, we’ve learned a lot. The epigenome refers to the 98% of our genome that does not code for proteins (what we traditionally call genes.) Instead, much of that huge portion of our genome has to do the regulation of genes, largely through the coding of various types of RNA. We have between 20,000 and 25,000 protein-coding genes.  That’s about the same number as a mouse or even a worm. And many if not most of these genes do pretty much the same thing across a wide spectrum of animals. What makes us different from a mouse or a worm is largely controlled by the epigenome.

It turns out that the epigenome responds to various factors in our environment like diet and toxins. These factors do cause changes in the epigenome during one’s lifetime, which, in turn, cause changes in the expression of various genes. The epigenome does not ever change the DNA sequence of a gene.  The remarkable fact is that some of the epigenomic changes acquired during a lifetime are passed on to progeny through the sperm and egg! Although it is not through the usage of parts of the body as Lamarck proposed, there is evidence of inheritance of traits acquired during a lifetime. One could call that Lamarckian.

Another way that acquired traits could be passed on to progeny in the future will be through germline genetic engineering when and if that becomes acceptable. So perhaps Lamarck was more prescient than we give him credit for.

Lamarck was extremely accomplished and well ahead of his time. He lived long before we understood genetics and his evolutionary theories preceded those of Darwin. To some extent, he has been given a bit of a bum rap. He got some things right and some things wrong. You can say that about a lot of our great scientists. He did recognize that something changes in an individual through generations and those changes interacted with the environment. Darwin also theorized that individuals change from generation to generation. Neither understood that these changes first require random genetic changes. Both knew that the environment played a large role in evolution, although Darwin’s natural selection is what is generally accepted today as the driving environmental force rather than usage of body components. He was wrong about the multiple spontaneous emergences of different life forms at different times, but he was correct about any apparent gaps in evolutionary lines reflecting an incomplete fossil record.

Let’s give Jean-Baptiste Lamarck his due.

Reference

Carey, N. (2012). The Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease, and Inheritance (1st ed.). Columbia University Press.

Image via Sponchia/Pixabay.