The Spoiler: Paul Kammerer’s Fight for the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics

Abstract

In scientific controversy, as in sports, there are winners and losers, but sometimes also spoilers—unheralded outsiders, who defy convention and change the terms, the style, and the outcome of the competition, even if they cannot win it themselves. In the fight over the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the 1910s and 1920s, Paul Kammerer was the spoiler. His dramatic experimental results and provocative arguments surprised the established stars of genetics and evolution and exposed their weaknesses, particularly their inability to agree on the nature and causes of variation or on a better explanation of Kammerer’s results than Kammerer’s own “Lamarckian” one.