Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics is a book published in 1924, written by Paul Kammerer, who studied developmental biology in Vienna, Austria, in the early twentieth century. The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics summarizes Kammerer's experiments, and explains their significance. In his book, Kammerer aims to explain how offspring inherit traits from their parents. Some scholars criticized Kammerer's reports and interpretations, arguing that they were inaccurate and misleading, while others supported Kammerer's work. Kammerer said that the results of his experiments demonstrated that organisms could adapt to different environments by acquiring new features during the course of their lifetimes, and that they transmitted those acquired features to their offspring.