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Lamarckism (Lamarckian inheritance).

1. Lamarckism (Lamarckian inheritance) is the idea than an organism can pass on characteristics that it acquired during its lifetime to its offspring (also known as heritability of acquired characteristics or soft
inheritance).
2. It is named after the French biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 - 1829), who incorporated the action of soft inheritance into his evolutionary theories.
3. He is often incorrectly cited as the founder of soft inheritance, which proposes that individual efforts during the lifetime of the organisms were the main mechanism driving species to adaptation as they supposedly would acquire adaptive changes and pass them on to their offspring.