A discussion on evolutionary theory and what being a living being entails.

Who is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck? If you asked someone who hasn’t taken biology in a few years, you might be met with a “Who?” or perhaps, “The guy with the giraffes?” Even when I took Intro to Biology last semester, we focused on the principle of use and disuse, with the example of the necks of giraffes, and how his theory on acquired traits was wrong.

It’s often difficult for us to imagine what seem like simple scientific concepts to have had to be conceptualized and researched by past scientists. So, it may be easy to dismiss Lamarck’s explanation for evolution as a misconception that Darwin later uncovered. However, research today suggests that aspects of Lamarck’s core premise anticipate modern findings. His theory of evolution, referred to as Lamarckism, states that organisms evolve from acquiring characteristics within their lifetime and passing them directly onto the next generation. While Lamarckism’s central mechanism of inheritance was proven to be genetically incorrect, the field of evolutionary biology has too often denied the agency of living beings to inform corrupted policies for centuries. In her book, The Power of Life: The Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Jessica Riskin calls for the reconsideration of Lamarck’s life and contributions to the field of evolution.

Riskin introduces Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as the eleventh child and fourth son from a French military family. By the time he was eleven, his family had run out of money and he was sent to study for priesthood in a seminary. However, when his father died, Lamarck was able to choose his own path by joining a regiment fighting in the Seven Years’ War. While he was stationed in Provence, he fell in love with the wildflowers that grew in its countryside. After he was discharged, he would go on to study botany in Paris.

Riskin went on to talk about Lamarck’s “emblematic” animal, the giraffe. Despite heavy associations with this animal, in his many writings, Lamarck only wrote around a paragraph on the topic of giraffes. For Lamarck, the giraffe was just one example of his idea that animals could transform their bodies “in just tiny infinite decimal ways by their behaviors.” Lamarck believed that “these (traits) would be inherited and added up over many many thousands of generations,” leading to distinct features like the neck of the giraffe. That claim provoked one of the longest lived controversies in science. Several centuries later, the idea that living organisms can transform their anatomy in ways that are heritable remains a contentious issue in evolutionary biology. 

The reason why this theory caused so much controversy at first, Riskin claims, was that Lamarck was usurping God’s monopoly on creation and reassigning it to living organisms. During the early 18th century, science and religion were deeply intertwined, with many viewing science as a way of studying God’s creation. But Lamarck proposed that living organisms “originated in spontaneous generation which happened when forces like electricity and heat acted on inanimate matter” and resulted in the production of single-celled organisms—spontaneously generating living matter. This matter would continue to complexify itself by a force he called “the pu” or the “power of life”, which is where Riskin derived the title of her book. 

Lamarck likened this force to the forces of contemporary physics (electricity, magnetism, and gravity) but more specific to living matter. As animals become more complex, Lamarck theorized that “another force of transformation enters into the story” which is responsiveness to the environment, where this behavior then leads to inheritance. Simple organisms experience a rudimentary level of the force but from the level of birds, organisms are sufficiently complex enough to “respond by acts of will.” This includes forming habits and ways of life, like the giraffe stretching its neck. 

During the publication of his theory, Lamarck worked as a botanist with the Royal Botanical Garden. His research centered on plants, based on the idea that living organisms generate the nonliving environment. He emphasized plants, in particular, because of their unique ability to sustain and reproduce themselves using just water, sunlight, and air.  However, after the events of the French Revolution, the garden committee was reorganized and Lamarck was given one of the lowest positions in zoology, assigned to the “professorship of insects and worms.” 

Although he was unhappy with his position, Lamarck said that invertebrates can show us the “inconceivable limit of animalization.” These beings, which are “barely endowed with animality,”were believed by Lamarck to be the earliest forms of animal life . Lamarck believed this essence of animal life was the power of generation. Invertebrates could do incredible things in terms of generation—insects could metamorphose, crustaceans could grow new legs, and snails could grow new heads. 

Lamarck wrote, “The tiniest and simplest animals have a frightening fecundity such that it seems as if materializes itself in every direction.” Riskin reminded us that Lamarck was working and writing in the Romantic period and was a “Romantic with a capital ‘R’” himself. His science interpreted living beings as tragic heroes. In his eyes, all living things ultimately have to succumb to the forces of nature and let go of all they have been “heroically composing and creating in a lifetime.” The idea of organisms in the formation of the minerals is still very popular today in geology. 

Riskin continued with Lamarck’s evidence of animals’ continual self transformation. For example, the vestigial teeth of white whales, and the vestigial eyes of moles and other creatures who live in the dark, and the vestigial leg bone structures of snakes that don’t need legs. This formed his law of “use and disuse”, in which organs that are not used will atrophy over generations. 

Lamark’s idea of self and world-making organisms made him some very powerful enemies—Georges Cuvier among them. Cuvier was a paleontologist and member of Napoleon’s scientific inner circle. As a devout Lutheran as well as a scientist, his beliefs on evolution often contradicted Lamarck’s. They were rivals until Lamarck’s death, after which Cuvier dedicated a scathing eulogy that mocked Lamarck’s theories on evolution. 

Cuvier assumed that the fossils of extinct creatures reflected a series of catastrophes, similar to those in the Bible, that would remove all the animals of a given time and  replace them with new acts of creation. Riskin said this scientific explanation lined up well with Napoleon’s own purposes, as he was intolerable to the emerging theory of evolution, viewing it as too radical. Cuvier’s approach provided a “doctrine of revolutionary change” that was at the same time, “profoundly conservative.” This only promised trouble for evolutionary theory as a whole, especially as the years moved onto the reactionary terms of the late 19th century.

Contrary to popular belief, Charles Darwin absolutely believed in the principles of use and disuse. He drew on Lamarck’s ideas on acquired characteristics and incorporated them into his own theory of evolution, even mentioning them in his Origin of Species. It was his followers, after he died around the turn of the 20th century, who eradicated all traces of Lamarckism from their Neo-Darwinist theory. 

Neo-Darwinism integrated the discovery of Mendelian genetics with Darwinist theory. One of the leaders of this movement was August Wiessmann—who had famously conducted the experiment disproving acquired characteristics by cutting off mice tails over five generations. This rhetoric was very powerful and is still used today in modern textbooks to support the notion that traits are passed down by genes, not life experiences.

A unifying principle of Neo-Darwinism was “the passivity of the evolving organism.” This denial of the agency of living beings, to Riskin, was not just an intellectual mistake. While researching, she was surprised to discover the extent to which essentially all the early Neo-Darwinists were fervently and explicitly eugenic. It makes sense that there would be some eugenic logic baked into the idea which supports that living beings—including human beings—are the passive objects of genetic programming and outside forces.

Riskin argues Neo-Darwinism has not only since informed two centuries of environmental destruction, but has also served as a tool to justify imperialism, racism, and socioeconomic inequality. Through its framework of applying biological concepts such as  “survival of the fittest” to human societies, Neo-Darwinism suggested that racial hierarchies were natural and predetermined, and that “superior” races were destined to dominate or eliminate “inferior” ones. 

Ending on a more positive note, Riskin claimed that Lamarck’s central idea of the agency of organisms has recently made a comeback. The study of epigenetics allows scientists to look at structures outside of DNA which can change gene expression patterns during an organism’s lifetime. The role of behavior in channeling natural selection is being reexamined. Theoretical biologists like Mary Jane West-Eberhard argue that genes are followers, not leaders, in evolution.

This unified theory merges ecological, behavioral, and cultural elements into the larger evolutionary picture. The inclusive approach we’re moving towards started centuries ago, with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

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