POST CONTRIBUTED BY: David Pursglove
I'm toying with the idea for a new page for Shift Happening: The work and recent revival (in some biological and other circles) of Lamarck.
In case you're new to him, he was Darwin's contemporary and held that evolutionary changes could be learned by one generation and passed down to the next. Darwin's strict mechanistic view walked all over Lamarck, and he was left to gather dust. Yet there have always been some who saw he was right, and some academics have been drummed out of the corps for touting his views and evidence for them in a college classroom.
Recently, papers and research have been gathering steam in Lamarck's favor.
I wrote this about him several years back. (See the post here)
I'm toying with the idea for a new page for Shift Happening: The work and recent revival (in some biological and other circles) of Lamarck.
In case you're new to him, he was Darwin's contemporary and held that evolutionary changes could be learned by one generation and passed down to the next. Darwin's strict mechanistic view walked all over Lamarck, and he was left to gather dust. Yet there have always been some who saw he was right, and some academics have been drummed out of the corps for touting his views and evidence for them in a college classroom.
Recently, papers and research have been gathering steam in Lamarck's favor.
I wrote this about him several years back. (See the post here)
Jean Baptiste Lamarck's descendent is alive and well and now living in England. He is Rupert Sheldrake who speaks of "morphic resonance" and that what we call "natural laws" are more accurately described as habits. . .that change through time. Lamarck's idea that organisms learn during their lifetimes and pass some of that learning along to the next generation was stuffed down the tubes by Darwin and his followers who insisted on a "random natural selection" explanation. Sheldrake talks of rats in Edinburgh who can learn mazes faster than rats who learned them in England several rat generations back. And these rats are from the same genetic strains but not descended from the original learners.
There's not room here to go into detail about Sheldrake's work (see the Bibliography here), but it's clear that despite the Darwinists, learning has something to do with evolution, and very likely to do with a possible evolutionary jump in our species. Another crisp demonstration of this was John Cairns' work at Harvard in 1988. He showed that bacteria unable to digest lactose (because the gene to digest it had been removed), if given no other food, will after a few days develop new proteins that can digest it. Very quick studies in evolution they are, eh?!
The exciting thing for Shift Happening is that here's a major contributor to what's still ahead of the culture's leading edge that's 150 years old!
There's not room here to go into detail about Sheldrake's work (see the Bibliography here), but it's clear that despite the Darwinists, learning has something to do with evolution, and very likely to do with a possible evolutionary jump in our species. Another crisp demonstration of this was John Cairns' work at Harvard in 1988. He showed that bacteria unable to digest lactose (because the gene to digest it had been removed), if given no other food, will after a few days develop new proteins that can digest it. Very quick studies in evolution they are, eh?!
The exciting thing for Shift Happening is that here's a major contributor to what's still ahead of the culture's leading edge that's 150 years old!
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