Was Lamarck right?

Was Lamarck right? Not really. He usually used large organisms as his examples. One famous example is the giraffe. He hypothesized that the giraffes would keep stretching higher and higher into trees, therefore causing their necks to elongate within that generation. This was thought to be heretable. Another modern day example could be bodybuilders. According to Larmarckism, if a person works out and develops large muscles, this should be heritable. If that same person did not work out and develop large muscles then the next generation would not have large muscles. This is obviously wrong.Also, heritable genetic information is held in the germline, at least for eukaryotes. The germ line genome has no effect on the characteristics of the somatic line. Therefore, the next generation could have inherited genes that the parent population never displayed. This is in direct contradiction to Larmarckism.I would say that Lamarck was wrong in how he applied hereditable traits. Larmarck emphasized characteristics first and then heretibality. The actual effect and cause is acquiring the trait and then developing the characteristic. Larmarck got it backwards.

Denesha,Good point. I think even Larmarck, if he were alive today, would agree that he is wrong without feeling picked on. He arived at his conclusions by looking at the evidence, and would as easily drop his theory with the evidence we have now. I do feel thankful to the scientific greats in history, and strive towards honoring those greats by trying to falsify their theories. The testing of a theory is one of the greatest honors in science. People avidly trying to falsify your theory means that it has merit, instead of being a crackpot idea.