Acquired Characteristic Definition & Meaning

British

Scientific

Examples

acquired characteristic British

noun

1. a characteristic of an organism that results from increased use or disuse of an organ or the effects of the environment and cannot be inherited See also Lamarckism

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012 acquired characteristic Scientific / ə-kwīrd′ /

1. A nonhereditary change of function or structure in a plant or animal made in response to the environment. Acquired characteristics include bodily changes brought about by disease or by repeated use or disuse of a body part (as in the building or atrophy of muscle tissue). The heritability of acquired characteristics was advocated by certain biological theorists like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and rejected by Charles Darwin in his formulation of the theory of evolution.

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

Weismann had proposed a radical alternative: perhaps hereditary information was contained exclusively in sperm and egg cells, with no direct mechanism for an acquired characteristic to be transmitted into sperm or eggs.

From Literature

Mentioning the limping family dog, Bunch, in an apt example of an acquired characteristic that cannot be inherited, he is reminded of an unfinished poem his mother wrote after Bunch died, which he prints.

From Nature

But wealth inheritance is obviously Lamarckian, in that it’s the inheritance of an acquired characteristic.

From Forbes

They acquired characteristic modes of speaking, of thinking.

From Project Gutenberg

And that—the inheritance of an acquired characteristic—is quite startling.

From Economist

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023

Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.