Lamarckism, known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism, is the notion that an organism can pass on to its offspring physical characteristics that the parent organism acquired through use or disuse during its lifetime.
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Lamarckism pointed out that he regarded pangenesis as occurring in protozoa and plants, which have no blood, as well as in animals.
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Lamarckism gave as an imagined illustration the idea that when giraffes stretch their necks to reach leaves high in trees, they would strengthen and gradually lengthen their necks.
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Lamarckism appealed to those, like the philosopher Herbert Spencer and the German anatomist Ernst Haeckel, who saw evolution as an inherently progressive process.
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Unlike neo-Darwinism, neo-Lamarckism is a loose grouping of largely heterodox theories and mechanisms that emerged after Lamarck's time, rather than a coherent body of theoretical work.
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Neo-Lamarckism remained influential in biology until the 1940s when the role of natural selection was reasserted in evolution as part of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
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Neo-Lamarckism was dominant in French biology for more than a century.
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French scientists who supported neo-Lamarckism included Edmond Perrier, Alfred Giard, Gaston Bonnier and Pierre-Paul Grasse .
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Lamarckism held that heterochrony is a main mechanism for evolutionary change and that novelty in evolution can be generated by genetic assimilation.
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Lamarckism's views were criticized by Arthur M Shapiro for providing no solid evidence for his theory.
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Form of Lamarckism was revived in the Soviet Union of the 1930s when Trofim Lysenko promoted the ideologically-driven research programme, Lysenkoism; this suited the ideological opposition of Joseph Stalin to genetics.
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Simpson noted that neo-Lamarckism "stresses a factor that Lamarck rejected: inheritance of direct effects of the environment" and neo-Lamarckism is closer to Darwin's pangenesis than Lamarck's views.
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Lamarckism noted that the Baldwin effect provided a reconciliation between the neo-Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian approaches, something that the modern synthesis had seemed to render unnecessary.
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