BioConcepts

environmental determinismUmweltdeterminismus (ger.)

• The theory that environment (freq. as opposed to heredity) is the primary influence on development, esp. that of a person or group. (OED 2012)
  category environment

  1892

  the inheritance of characters individually acquired under the stress of surrounding conditions (direct environmental determinism)

  Lloyd Morgan, C. (1892). Variation. Chamber’s Encyclopædia, vol. 10, 427-429: 428.

  1915

  The age of researches in bacteriology and environmental determinism is an age when innumerable effects, always in existence, are being discovered and valued as never before.

  Clark, J.M. (1915). The concept of value: a rejoinder. Quart. J. Econom. 29, 709-723: 711.

  1924

  environmental determinism to which the one group of thinkers adheres. The instinctivists constitute a group adhering with equal tenacity to biological determinism

  Bernard, L.L. (1924). Instinct. A Study in Social Psychology: 31.

  1937

  Infra-primate evolution is characterized by passivity of the organism, which evolves through a sort of environmental determinism. In man, on the contrary, evolution has become autodirective. The balance of power has shifted from the environment to the organism. […] Natural selection has been tossed out of the saddle and is prostrate somewhere back in the muck

  Hooton, E.A. (1937). Apes, Men, and Morons: 249.

  1979

  Darwinism is not a mechanistic theory of environmental determinism. It does not view organisms as billiard balls, buffeted about by a shaping environment.

  Gould, S.J. (1979). Another look at Lamarck. New Scientist 84 (4 Oct), 38-40: 39; id. (1980). The Panda’s Thumb: 81.