acquired character

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acquired character

n.
A change of function or structure in an organism made in response to the environment. Also called acquired characteristic.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

acquired′ char′acter


n.
a noninheritable trait that results from certain environmental influences.
[1875–80]
Random House Kernerman Webster's College Dictionary, © 2010 K Dictionaries Ltd. Copyright 2005, 1997, 1991 by Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.
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References in periodicals archive
* Acquired characteristics mean the income and wealth associated with someone's own college education.
That process allows acquired characteristics to become inherited.
It, too, talked about acquired characteristics, but not as an alternative to Darwinism.
Also, Glass discusses Darwin's book Pangenesis in which Darwin reintroduces the old Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He goes on to describe it as Darwin's "great blunder" (p.
The results suggest that many plants acquired characteristics that helped them thrive in colder climates -- such as dying back to the roots in winter -- long before they first encountered freezing.
It addresses the history and archaeology of both the burgh of Whithorn and the Isle of Whithorn, which were settled sometime before the fifth century and had acquired characteristics of a town by the late 10th or early 11th.
With the development of his theory of pangenesis in 1868, Darwin increasingly turned to the inheritance of acquired characteristics to supply the variation needed for evolution, which inevitably diminished the role of natural selection.
Both Ruskin and Wilde were in the Idealist camp, yet Wilde eventually differed from Ruskin in his rejection of realistic art, primarily because they disagreed in their uses of a now-discredited theory of evolution, the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Darwinian evolution, however, does not--indeed, it cannot--transmit acquired characteristics to future generations.
This may seem far-fetched, but consider that, just as the Soviet Union relied on an incorrect model of the economy, it also relied on an incorrect theory of biology: the discredited theory that acquired characteristics could be inherited.
He performed blood-transfusion experiments on rabbits, which undermined Darwin's effort to build upon Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's suggestion that acquired characteristics can be inherited.
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