Certainly the Darwinian view has had its share of challenges during the past century, and has survived them. This challenge, however, comes from a novel direction. The molecular immunologist Edward J. Steele, based at the University of Wollongong in Australia, claims to have evidence for a Lamarckian hereditary mechanism. The basic idea was that organisms make biological changes in adapting to their environment and then pass these changes on to their offspring. Since then, Lamarck has been ridiculed for presumably implying that giraffes developed their long necks by stretching, generation after generation, toward the leaves on trees.
Modern biologists are adamant that nothing of the sort occurs, ever.
Steele first claimed to have experimental evidence to the contrary back in 1979, when he and his colleague Reginald Gorczynski were visiting researchers at the Ontario Cancer Institute in Toronto. Together, they injected infant male mice with cells from a different group of mice and watched as the infants' immune systems developed a tolerance to the foreign cells. Then they claimed to observe the same tolerance in many of the mice's offspring. Biologists in Britain were intrigued enough to try to repeat Steele's experiments themselves. After an impressive effort, however, these experimenters ended up with very different results.