This chapter analyzes August Weismann's theory of germinal selection—a process of competition and selection among the hereditary units within the germplasm. He argued that the germ line was not affected by the changes undergone by the somatic cells during the organism's lifetime and that heritable adaptive evolutionary changes resulted from the operation of natural selection on individuals, a form of selection that he called “personal selection”. The chapter examines the problems that challenged Weismann's original focus on personal selection and explains how he interpreted them in terms of his germinal selection theory.
...MoreBook Gissis, Snait B.; Jablonka, Eva (2011) Transformations of Lamarckism: From Subtle Fluids to Molecular Biology.
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