lamarck and lysenko (old post)

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet Chevalier de Lamarck, (of course) was a french biologist, who championed the idea of the inheritance of acquired characterstics. however, he did this in the early 1800's, with his original publication, Philosophie Zoologique, dated 1809.

read on...

the 'cat' experiment, as discussed in class was originally cited by Mr. St. George Mivart in his book "The Cat" (1881). He mentioned a case where a female cat had her tail badly injured when a cart-wheel ran over it and the owner judged it best to amputate the whole tail. Since then, the female had had two litters of kittens, and in each litter some of the kittens had a stump of tail, while the others had full-length tails.

as far as russia goes: i intended to refer to lysenko, who revived the long-discarded ideas of lamarkism in russia. indeed, genetics had been declared a 'bourgeois pseudoscience' in the Soviet Union in 1948 which persisted though the mid 1960s, lysenkoism was found to have caused mass starvation and serious, long-term harm to Soviet agriculture -- though it appeased the communist rulers of the time.

i won't even go into the manx cat... but, will note that the nytimes has an excellent section on evolution in todays paper!