03 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
We Inherit from Our Parent's Zygotes
It IS a mistake that biologists used to make, too. They believed that evolution proceeded by accumulating the changes that individuals gathered during their lives. The idea was most clearly formulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, but Charles Darwin sometimes used it, too. The classic example is a blacksmith's son supposedly inheriting his father's acquired muscles at birth. We now know that Lamarckism cannot work because bodies are built from cakelike recipes, not architectural blueprints, and i...The failure of Lamarkism means we do not inherit our genes from our parents, but from their sex cells.