Lamarckism The Whorl list — 1 messages, 1 voices, 20 Jan 1997 https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/whorl/36 Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact. ============================================================================== Ranjit Bhatnagar — 20 Jan 1997, 20:43 As list administrator, I decree that discussion of Wolfe's views on lamarckism is acceptable as long as you pay a Lamarck Tax of 200% in Long Sun content. In an attempt to *forestall* extended discussion: Lamarckism, according to American Heritage Dictionary: The theory that adaptive responses to environment cause structural changes capable of being inherited. After Chevalier de [[Lamarck]] (1744-1829), its formulator. There's an interesting page about Lamarck at http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/lamarck.html The discussion on this page gives Lamarck's ideas the benefit of the doubt, and, I think, shares Wolfe's view that Lamarckism, while wrong on the details, is a useful metaphor to describe the some of results of Darwinian natural selection. But Wolfe would rather make bold pronouncements ("We done Lamarck wrong," or "The gods of the Greeks really existed") without explanation. Questions or problems to whorl-owner at lists.best.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------