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Q.Who disproved Lamarck's theory of Acquired characters ? How ?

Tamil Nadu DgeTamil Nadu HSC (DGE) Board 2024Subjective· 3mImportance★★★★★
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Weismann's tail-amputation experiment on mice, spanning over 20 generations, showed that an acquired (surgically induced) change is not passed to offspring, refuting Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characters.

Lamarck's theory of inheritance of acquired characters proposed that structural changes an organism acquires during its lifetime (due to use, disuse, or environment) can be passed on to its offspring. August Weismann challenged this with his germplasm theory, which distinguishes the germplasm (reproductive/germ cells, carrying hereditary information passed to the next generation) from the somatoplasm (all other body cells). He argued that only changes affecting the germplasm can be inherited; changes to somatic cells/structures cannot. To test this, he amputated the tails of mice and bred them, repeating this for more than 20 successive generations -- yet every generation of offspring was still born with a normal, full-length tail, exactly as their unmutilated ancestors had been before any tails were cut. This demonstrated that the acquired change (loss of tail) in the paren …

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