Editor's Desk 
An evolutionary model that predates Darwin’s natural selection is making a comeback
Evolution is a fact of life. So much so that even the theory of evolution is evolving. Lately, a centuries-old discredited idea has been making a strong comeback. It helps us explain scientific observations that according to standard evolutionary theory should be impossible.
I’m referring to Lamarckism, named after theoretical proposals from French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1809. Lamarckism stands for the hypothesis that parents of a given organism may acquire or improve certain characteristics during their lifetimes in response to the demands of their environment. And they then somehow transmit those characteristics to their offspring, making those better able to cope with the same demands too.
Lamarck sought to explain why organisms and their environments fit so well together, and how organisms change over time, as observed in the fossil record. Of course, an alternative explanation was provided by Charles Darwin (and others) half a century later. Darwin’s ideas were built around natural selection, which says that some individuals within a species are born with differences that lead them to perform better and therefore reproduce more than others.
Darwin argued that if these differences can be passed from parent to offspring, the next generation will contain relatively more of these higher performing individuals. In other words, the next generation…
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