Textbooks explain why the mythical contest between Lamarck and Darwin took place and why it went in Darwin’s favor. It tells fictitious stories about tests that supposedly have refuted Lamarck’s theory. In reality, those tests have been directed not at Lamarck’s particular claims but at the ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It is an idea that was held by Lamarck and Darwin alike, and by most of their scientific contemporaries.

One such test has been described in the high school book named Addison Wesley’s Biology under the headline Lamarck Disproven. In 1889, German biologist August Weismann showed that Lamarck’s explanation of evolution was incorrect. Weismann cut off the tails of hundreds of mice for 22 generations. Lamarck’s hypothesis would predict that eventually mice would be born with shorter tails or no tails at all. However, Weismann’s mice continued to produce baby mice with normal tails. Weismann concluded that changes in the body during an individual’s lifetime do not affect the reproductive cells or the offspring.

The story combines false history backed by a fundamental misconception. The acquired characteristics that figured in Lamarck’s thinking were changes that resulted from an individual’s own drives and actions, not from the action of external agents. Lamarck was not concerned with wounds, injuries on mutilations and nothing that Lamarck had set forth was tested or disproved by Weismann’s tail chopping experiment.

Those who favored natural selection as the chief mechanism of evolution, and who rejected the inheritance of acquired characteristics – were called Neo-Darwinians. The other group, which advocated a wide variety of evolutionary mechanisms and also accepted the premise that acquired traits would pass from one generation to the next, were called Neo-Lamarckians. With advancement in genetics, the ideas of Neo- Lamarckians were abandoned.

An uninformed textbook writer, upon hearing that there was a controversy between Neo-Lamarckians and Neo-Darwinians said, "I must have inferred that Lamarck and Darwin themselves have been opponents, and their ideas about evolution must have been utterly different, must have invented a tale based on his false inferences." Ever since, textbook companies have been copying and recopying it.

Lamarck’s ideas about giraffes – that their necks grew longer as they stretched for distant leaves, and that their elongated necks were inherited by their offspring – has been cited and illustrated in one schoolbook after another. A passage about giraffes really does occur in Lamarck’s writings, but the schoolbook writers obviously have not looked at it. Instead they have seized upon an added version of the giraffe scenario, and they have been recycling that version for decades.

They present it in a highly misleading way. They don’t tell that the giraffe scenario is merely a hypothetical example of how a Lamarckian "mechanism might work – not an example of something that has actually been studied scientifically. They also fail to tell that Lamarck’s notion about giraffes, like all his evolutionary speculations, involved the mystical principle of progress toward perfection".