Why this word is great
LAMARCKISM — [Noun] The discredited biological theory that organisms can transmit traits acquired through use or disuse during their lifetime to their offspring, proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. From the name of the French biologist who proposed the theory, combined with the suffix -ism, denoting a theory or doctrine. Unlike "Darwinism" (which grounds evolution in natural selection’s cold arithmetic) or "Mendelian inheritance" (which reduces heredity to the shuffling of immutable genes), Lamarckism is a theory of striving—of giraffes stretching their necks for higher leaves and bequeathing that elongation, of blacksmiths’ sons born with their fathers’ hardened hands, of weightlifters’ children inheriting not the discipline but the very muscles. It is the wistful idea that effort might echo in bloodline: a pianist’s children inheriting calloused fingertips, the fantasy that we could, through sheer will, bend the iron laws of biology. A beautiful wrongness.