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Erleben wir eine Renaissance des Lamarckismus? - Are we experiencing a renaissance of Lamarckism?
Horst Kress
Keywords: Lamarckism, biology, life, Sciences, Lamarck, Theory of evolution
Categories: Life Sciences, Medicine
DOI: 10.17160/josha.6.8.596
Languages: German
In the preceding second essay on the Renaissance of Lamarckism (JOSHA Journal Vol. 4, Issue 6) we were able to follow how the Sutton-Boveri chromium moment theory of inheritance achieved a grandiose breakthrough through the works in the fly-room of T. H. Morgan with the help of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. By 1935 it had finally become clear that genes in chromosomes are strung together like pearls. However, the question of how to imagine the material and functional properties of these mysterious pearls remained unanswered. However, biologists and geneticists were unable to answer this question with the means at their disposal in the form of cytological analyses or crossings. In particular, it was unclear where intellectual levers could be used for further progress, which would inevitably lead to the invisible world of molecular dimensions. This required new approaches and methods and, accordingly, cooperation with other branches of the natural sciences that could help to set such a rethink in motion.