Abstract

The German Biologist Victor Bauer (1881-1927) worked from 1903 to 1914 at the Naples Zoological Station and in a private laboratory in the Naples area. He published papers on marine biology and physiology, especially sensory-physiology. From 1909 to 1913 he developed in his unpublished note-books a remarkable version of a neo-Lamarckian theory of evolution. Bauer regarded the organism as a dynamic system that is tightly connected with the environment. The properties of this system maintain homeostasis despite changing environmental conditions. Information from the environment is received mainly by the sense organs which transmit this information via the nerves to all other organs. It is their function to regulate the organism and to maintain homeostasis. At any given time the organism is the product of the processing of information from the genome and information of the environment. If the environmental stimuli are strong enough and last long enough they lead to a feed-back of environmental information to the genome of all cells and hence to heritable changes. Thus intra-vitam-adaptation can lead to evolutionary changes