A FUNDAMENTAL ISSUE

Is there an assumption among some biologists today that acquired
characteristics are transmitted?
Let me explain my reason for asking:

Often comments appear in forums such as sbe, to the effect that we humans
are this way or that way or another way because our distant ancestors
encountered this or that or the other situation. But if acquired
characteristics are not transmittable, then how would any experience of our
human, and/or pre-human, ancestors have had any impact upon us -- or even
upon their own offspring -- at all.

Does not all the evidence indicate that the source of all evolutionary
change originates from mutations resulting from "errors of duplication" in
the codes in reproductive organs and their output?

Granted, those individuals, among any sexually-reproduction-dependent
species. who have not survived -- at any given time in the history of life
on Earth -- have not passed along their more favorable or more unfavorable
codes. But those who survived, mated, had offspring, and raised those
offspring for as long as necessary for them to, in turn, reproduce... did
not pass along any acquired characteristic. Isn't that right? They merely
passed along "correct" copies of the codings that got passed along to
themselves or they passed along modified copies of the codes that got passed
along to themselves. Isn't that right?

So, the experiences of the parents who reproduced would have had no
influence upon shaping their young exactly like themselves or shaping them
differently from themselves. Right?

Of course, if the parents (or adoptive parents, or group as a whole) did not
survive to raise the offspring long enough to survive on his/her own, that
"experience" would make a difference. But the difference still would not
pass along anything acquired by the "rearers," right?

All that would be required of an offspring is that it survive... and NOT
that it would be like its parents... beyond being so "strange" or so "alien
looking" to them that they would not feed or support it.

In a nutshell then, why could not progressive offspring, generation after
generation, change in accordance with what situational filters each
encountered (as individual or as participants in the species at any given
increment of its evolution)? Over time, what difference would it make if
the ancestors lived in water, crawled on land, flew, or ate one kind of
thing from the food chain or another kind? And, in fact, is this not
exactly why there is so much diversity of life today? Because offspring
were constrained only to be enough like their parents to avoid being
abandoned too soon, and enough like the parents to be able to live off what
the parents provided by way of food and protection until it (the individual
offspring) could go its own way and be as different as it could be and still
survive to propagate?

In short, what do most of us believe? Do we believe evolution is a matter
of what ancestors experienced (other than whether they survived to
propagate)? Or do we believe today's creatures are constrained in their
appearance and behavior by what happened to ancestors hundreds of thousands
of years ago... or longer?

It seems to me that change not only can depart from what distant ancestors
did or did not do, but has. And, were it not so, there would not be so
much diversity of species as exist, in evidence of that, today.

g


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