SciFi's Theories Of Evolution

io9 explores SciFi's most interesting explanations:

If Ben Stein really wants to convince us all that evolution is a crock, he doesn't need to make a documentary and play semantic games with Richard Dawkins. He just has to sit us down and make us watch this episode of Star Trek: Voyager, where traveling at super-warp speed causes Janeway and Paris to super-evolve into lizards (and make lizard babies.) But it's not just Voyager — science fiction provides a ton of evolution theories that make intelligent design seem downright sensible.

...4. Your children will inherit your body-mods. Maybe the earliest evolutionary theorist was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) who believed in the idea of "soft inheritance," where you pass on your acquired characteristics to your kids. If your body adapts to circumstances during your life — for example, if a particular organ gets smaller because you use it less — then your children will inherit it. (That organ will be smaller in your kids.) In fact, only genetic changes are passed on. But that doesn't stop science fiction from presenting changes to a creature's body, or non-genetic adaptations that you make in the course of your life, as being heritable. (Lamarck's ideas are sometimes mischaracterized as, "if you lose a leg, you'll have one-legged children," but he wasn't that silly.) In David Cronenberg's 1979 classic The Brood, a cutting-edge psychotherapy causes patients to manifest their darkest emotions in their own bodies — and one transformed woman gives birth to monster children that she can control telepathically.