Darwin ou Lamarck?

Does Evolution Evolve Under Pressure?

• By Emily Singer, Quanta Magazine

The biologist, now at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, hoped to resolve a major debate that had rocked biology in different incarnations for more than 100 years. Were organisms capable of altering themselves to meet the needs of their environment, as Jean Baptiste Lamarck had proposed in the early 1800s? Or did mutations occur randomly, creating a mixture of harmful, harmless or beneficial outcomes, which in turn fueled the trial-and-error process of natural selection, as Charles Darwin proposed in “On the Origin of Species”?
Although Darwin’s ideas have clearly triumphed in modern biology, hints of a more Lamarckian style of inheritance have continued to surface. Rosenberg’s experiments were inspired by a controversial study, published in the late 1980s, that suggested that bacteria could somehow direct their evolution, “choosing which mutations will occur,” the authors wrote — a modern molecular biologist’s version of Lamarckian theory.
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