Lamarck's Epigenetic Theory

“In light of recent discoveries, was Lamarck right?”

In order to discuss the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, we must first understand what they were. Born in France in 1744, Lamarck was one of the first evolutionary theorists. He wrote several books on invertebrate zoology and palaeontology. In one of these, “Philosophie zoologique”, he set forth his theory of evolution. This theory had several components, including that organisms have an inbuilt ‘drive to evolve’ and are striving for perfection. However, the element of Lamarckism that we are most concerned with today is the idea that characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime can be passed on to its offspring. This is known as inheritance of acquired characteristics. (Waggoner, 1996)

The advent and rise of Darwinism and the theory of natural selection soon discredited much of Lamarck’s evolutionary theory. Later on, the discovery of genetics would further condemn it, through the understanding that the genome is preserved and passed on intact to offspring.

However, a form of neo-Lamarckian theory is being revived through the field of epigenetics. The term epigenetic has been defined in several different ways since it was first coined by C.H. Waddington in 1942. The area of epigenetics relevant to Lamarckism is sometimes called ‘transgenerational epigenetics’ or ‘epigenetic inheritance'

Male rats that were overfed and so became overweight and developed diabetes-like symptoms fathered female offspring who were a normal weight and yet had the same diabetes-like abnormalities (Ng et al., 2010). Furthermore, Rogers et al. in 2013 found that paternal stress in mice had an epigenetic effect on their offspring’s hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis. If a similar effect is found in humans it will show our lifestyle choices can have a directly inherited effect on our