Inheritance of characteristics that arise in individuals other than by mutation or horizontal gene transfer.

Though often characterized as fanciful – e.g., giraffe's staining their necks to reach higher leaves, "resulting" in longer necks that are passed on to offspring – in fact there do exist circumstances in which non-mutational modifications of parents impact the characteristics of offspring. See for example the concepts of genomic imprinting as well as that of CRISPR.

Note that in the above paragraph, placing "resulting" in quotation marks is meant to either imply or suggest irony. That is, to the extent that Larmarckian evolution does not occur in giraffes, then in fact the straining by a giraffe to reach higher leaves, even if it did result in a perhaps marginally longer neck in that giraffe, this would not be expected to directly give rise to a longer neck in that giraffe's offspring.