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Pseudo science

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Mendelian inheritance. Gregor Mendel, the German-speaking Augustinian monk who founded the modern science of genetics.

Mendelian inheritance

Mendelian inheritance was initially derived from the work of Gregor Johann Mendel published in 1865 and 1866 which was re-discovered in 1900. It was initially very controversial. When Mendel's theories were integrated with the chromosome theory of inheritance by Thomas Hunt Morgan in 1915, they became the core of classical genetics. Eugenics. While eugenic principles have been practiced as far back in world history as Ancient Greece, the modern history of eugenics began in the early 20th century when a popular eugenics movement emerged in Britain[8] and spread to many countries, including the United States and most European countries.

Eugenics

In this period, eugenic ideas were espoused across the political spectrum. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies meant to improve the genetic stock of their countries. Lamarckism. Lamarckism (or Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea that an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as heritability of acquired characteristics or soft inheritance).

Lamarckism

It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories as a supplement to his concept of an inherent progressive tendency driving organisms continuously towards greater complexity, in parallel but separate lineages with no extinction. Lamarck did not originate the idea of soft inheritance, which proposes that individual efforts during the lifetime of the organisms were the main mechanism driving species to adaptation, as they supposedly would acquire adaptive changes and pass them on to offspring.

History[edit] 1880 to 1930[edit]