Natural Selection is the process by which certain heritable traits that convey some advantage become more common in a population over successive generations. These advantages typically make the organism more likely to survive and successfully reproduce.

If contemporary genetic determinism was tainted with the over-extrapolations of eugenics, Lamarkism and epigenetics labored under its own set of miasma –brought about, strangely enough, as much by differences in political philosophy as by differences in genetic determinism.

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (1744 – 1829) was a French naturalist and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. Lamarck is however remembered today mainly in connection with a discredited theory of heredity, the inheritance of acquired traits (“Lamarckism”) He was also one of the first to use the term “biology” in its modern sense.