Plausibility Check: Lamarckism as an accepted scientific theory?

Freizeit

Banned
If Darwin (and by extension his theory of natural selection) is butterflied, would it be possible for Lamarckism to take its place? What would be the consequences of this?
 
It would not, because Lamarckism is not correct (more precisely: Does not give accurate predictions to what will occur over time). This would be incredibly obvious with even a modicum of experimentation. More to the point, I'm pretty sure Lamarck's ideas were discredited before Darwin, and you can't forget Alfred Russel Wallace, who came up with natural selection completely independently and triggered Darwin's publication of Origin of Species. That indicates there's enough material out there for other people to come up with it if you just get rid of Darwin, or get rid of him and Wallace, or...you get the point. You'd end up having to kill most biologists on the planet to avoid natural selection being developed.
 
If Darwin (and by extension his theory of natural selection) is butterflied, would it be possible for Lamarckism to take its place? What would be the consequences of this?

No.

Science is very good at (eventually) getting its theories to converge on reality. Without Darwin, natural selection would still have been proposed by someone else, like Wallace (as the previous poster pointed out). In fact, it probably would have only been delayed by just a few years, because, contrary to popular opinion, Darwin's theory was just one of many similar ideas being tossed about in scientific circles of the time.

I've actually toyed with the idea of having science discover evolution through Mendel's mechanistic work with genetics, and having the ideas of mutation and natural selection come from researchers working with Mendelian inheritance.
 
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