Darwin Vs Lamarck

Charles Darwin and Jean – Baptiste Lamarck are two of the earliest scientist known for their distinct concepts of evolution. Although both concepts aimed to explain the complexities of evolution, they each take a different approach. Darwin approached evolution through his views of natural selection, while Lamarck approached it through his model of acquired Characteristics. Darwin’s natural selection referred to survival of the fittest. In organisms some variations are better adapted to their conditions of life than others, and, on average, the favorable ones are preserved while the others perish (Holmes.,1948). Lamarck was best known for his suggestion that the effects of use and disuse or acquired characteristics can be inherited and drive

During the 1800s when Lamarck Suggested his model of acquired characteristics, evolution was a fairly new explored topic, which made it difficult to unravel at the time. The idea that the effects of use and disuse – “acquired characters” – are inherited was not original to Lamarck. However, his insistence that the effects of such inheritance go beyond within-species change and can account for the generation of new species, for patterns of diversity and for adaptation launched the theory of evolution (Jablonka, Lamm). Lamarck created two laws of evolution: The law of use and disuse and the law of inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lamarck’s first law, the law of use and disuse, states that a frequent and continuous use of an organ leads to a profound development of that organ, with the strength of this development being proportional to the time in which the organ has been used. Disuse of an organ weakens and degrades the organ until it has completely faded away. Use or disuse of an organ depends

Darwin continually studied finches on the Galapagos Island – Daphne Major – as a method to understand the complexities of evolution. Darwin pushed back at Lamarck’s model by introducing the idea that DNA and inheritance played more of a role in evolution than acquired characteristics. While on the islands, Darwin noticed that selection was a large factor in evolution. As the climate or food supply changed drastically, a species with a certain favored trait – such as a larger beak or larger body – survived while the species without the favored trait died out. However, Selection does not play a significant role in Lamarck's model because, for him, speciation occurs at the level of variation. Because a demand model of variation is at the heart of Lamarck's model, selection falls out of the process to a significant degree. Darwin relies on a supply model of variation, and thus, selection was his key concern (Gilady, Hoffmann., 2013). He was most interested in how variation among individuals translated into differentiation among populations. The link between individual variation and population differentiation is inheritance—some individuals survive to reproduce and their genetic material is passed to the next