Orthogenesis was the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to change, in a unilinear fashion, towards ever-greater perfection.
32.
He differed to the modern synthesis in his acceptance of other mechanisms of evolution such as the inheritance of acquired characteristics and orthogenesis.
33.
Orthogenesis has been described as an " anti-Darwinian " evolutionary theory because of its stance on the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection.
34.
The Russian biologist Karl Ernst von Baer had believed in a teleological force in nature which has been compared to a form of orthogenesis.
35.
Those who accepted this idea, however, did not necessarily accept that the mechanism driving orthogenesis was teleological ( goal-directed ).
36.
In the 1950s the German paleontologist Otto Schindewolf developed a theory of orthogenesis, which claimed that variation tends to move in a predetermined direction.
37.
In the meantime, a variety of theories of inheritance ( based on pangenesis, orthogenesis, or other mechanisms ) were debated and investigated vigorously.
38.
However, in the 1930s, orthogenesis was disproved by Darwinians led by Julian Huxley, who noted that antler size was relative to body size.
39.
This theory, too, was countered by Stephen Jay Gould, as he deemed the allometry theory to be very similar to the orthogenesis theory.
40.
His theory of orthogenesis ( straight-line evolution ) and eventual decay, claimed to be embedded within a cyclical view of the evolutionary process.
