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Students often express Lamarckian ideas—that changes acquired during an organism’s lifetime can be inherited—when reasoning about natural selection. Researchers have described this reasoning as arising from incorrect and unproductive misconceptions. Using the theoretical tools of resource theory and data from interviews with college students, we argue that an alternative explanation for students’ apparent Lamarckian reasoning is that they are seeking to provide mechanisms that can account for trait change. Unlike canonical populationlevel mechanisms, organism-level mechanisms are grounded in plausible changes to organismal forms, physiologies, or behaviors. We found that organism-level mechanistic reasoning arose in interviews when students recognized a need for a mechanistic explanation and shifted into an epistemological framing of in-the-moment knowledge construction. Rather than interpret Lamarckian ideas as misconceptions, we argue that they can be viewed as evidence of students' generative epistemological resources for seeking and providing mechanisms.