The theory of acquired character proposes that species evolve by the inheritance of traits acquired or modified in their lifetime, which are then incorporated into the hereditary constitution. The French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the first to put this idea into a systematic theory and gave the well-known example explaining how giraffes may have evolved their long necks. Lamarck proposed that giraffes were formerly antelope-like animals, which stretched their neck muscles to reach leaves growing higher up on trees. The length thus gained during the parents' lifetime was then passed on to the offspring. As the first testable theory of evolution it could be disproved in many cases and recently the success of classical genetics and molecular biology submerged the theory of acquired character as an evolutionary mechanism with scientific evidence today suggesting that variation in characters is the product of random genetic mutations...