[RobbyS]

Mainly his disregard of heredity as a cauative factor. He was largely dependent on Lamarcks’s notion of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. He rejected Weisman’s work on cells, and of course was ignorant of Mendel’s work. His followers accepted this as dogma, and forty years after Origin of Species , Haeckel set the whole theory in concrete in his Die Weltraetzel. As I said, scholars who have become convinced of a master theory are unlikely to deviate from or accept anything different.

[allmendream]

Heredity as a causative factor? A causative factor of what? His entire theory had to do with heredity of discernible traits. His theory of inheritance of fixed features contrasted GREATLY with Lamarck’s notion of acquired characteristics, and was hardly dependent upon it (but dependence upon other theory is not a weakness but a strength of a theory, in this case it contrasts with a discarded hypothesis of Lamarck, it is not dependent upon it). Weisman’s work was well after Darwin’s. Darwin’s work is dependent upon the same heredity of traits that Mendel described, that he formulated it without knowledge of Mendel is amazing, but it doesn’t reveal a weakness in his theory, just his incomplete knowledge. He was also unaware of Endogenous Retroviral Sequences, is this a weakness in his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection?

[allmendream]

Darwin’s “followers” did not accept that Lamarck’s notion of inheritance of acquired characteristics was true, they disproved it. Biologists accepted Weisman’s work on cells, and established that heredity was through germ line cells not somatic cells, and embraced his refutation of any discernible Lamarkian evolutionary mechanism. Neither was ignorance of Mendel’s work accepted as dogma, but Biologists wanted to know what the hereditary material was and how it did it. So what exactly did Darwin’s “followers” accept as dogma again?