Historically and conceptually, modern Genetics and modern Evolutionary Theory are closely intertwined. Mendel and Darwin both published their masterpieces in the mid-1800s and both were promptly misunderstood and discounted for half a century. Both theories required several more “kicks at the can” before final acceptance. Put simply: the Theory of Evolution itself evolved in response to an emerging understanding of Genetics.
Some quick questions:
Question: Name the scientist that first suggested “the effects of use and disuse” were passed from one generation to the next?
Answer: Charles Darwin and NOT Jean-Baptiste Lamarck who actually had a somewhat different theory.
Question: Name the scientist who first to employed the term evolve/evolution while also suggesting human beings had “evolved” from apes?
Answer: That would be Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. (Lamarck in fact invented the word “evolution”, a word which never appeared in Darwin’s Book “Origin of the Species”).
Question: Why had scientists at the turn of the previous century (including Julian Huxley) concede the “eclipse of Darwinism” as a failed theory, requiring a later resurrection under the rubric of “Neo-Darwinism” by August Weismann? (more to come)
Answer: Charles Fleeming Jenkin (inventor of the cable-car) “conclusively” contradicted Darwin with a decidedly racist rebuttal premised on a misunderstanding of how genetics operates. Jenkin’s rebuttal was so outrageously racist, that modern politically-correct textbooks refrain from even whispering a mention of that nasty exchange. Such omissions constitute a terrible mistake! The citation of one particular instance of racism and how it lead to incorrect conclusions slowing down the progress of science (no differently than Nazism, as another example) should be highlighted in class, not ignored!
Question: So how was it Mendel could see what Jenkin and others could not?
Answer: Because Mendel was a great researcher but a terrible teacher. Because Mendel could not find a job as a teacher or as a professor, Mendel needed to resort to “Plan B” and ended up side-lined as a celibate monk. Mendel’s perspective of sex “from the outside” may have permitted the insights that inspired his experiments
Darwin subscribed to a “blending theory” of inheritance by mistakenly believing in the inheritance of acquired characteristics including the “effects of use and disuse” That is correct; Darwin’s theory of genetics, called “Pangenesis”, is no different than what textbooks today would call “Lamarckism”. Darwin shared Lamarck’s belief that reproductive tissue somehow responded directly to environmental stimuli in order to generate adaptive changes in the next generation.
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-origin-of-species/chapter-05.html
Historical irony is compounded further, upon consideration that Gregor Mendel, a (frustrated and perhaps sexually preoccupied?) celibate Catholic clergyman clearly recognized that sexual reproduction necessarily contradicted “blending inheritance”. Consider the offspring of any couple; individuals of the next generation are decidedly masculine or feminine and not intermediate. (Please – No gratuitous Michael Jackson jokes! – Let the poor man rest in peace…). Accordingly, we are supposed to believe that Mendel’ new laws should have been able to rescue Darwin’s theory, had Darwin only known.
True, Mendel’s cerebral work was theoretical and his convoluted purple prose almost incomprehensible. But, there was little chance that Mendel’s principles, predicated on the peculiarities of pea plants would have ever been acknowledged “Scientific Law” at the time. Animal genetics (human genetics in particular) appeared to follow a different and non-particulate; in other words, decidedly non-Mendelian model. The offspring of African and European parents present a “mixed-race”, i.e. apparently “blended” phenotype. Henry Charles Fleeming Jenkin (inventor of the cable-car) “conclusively” contradicted Darwin with a decidedly racist rebuttal – so egregiously racist in fact, that modern textbooks refrain from even whispering a mention of that nasty exchange. Darwin had already conceded that “blending inheritance” contradicted Natural Selection but was unable to resolve the discrepancy.
In correspondence with Wallace, Darwin himself appreciated that a correct and proper appreciation of genetics was required to rebut Fleeming Jenkin. Fleeming Jenkin rebuttal was premised on “Blending inheritance” which presumed that the mechanics of inheritance was the mixing of fluids from both the mother and the father.
… Suppose a white man to have been wrecked on an island inhabited by negroes…. Our shipwrecked hero would probably become king; he would kill a great many blacks in the struggle for existence; he would have a great many wives and children, while many of his subjects would live and die as bachelors…. Our white’s qualities would certainly tend very much to preserve him to good old age, and yet he would not suffice in any number of generations to turn his subjects’ descendants white…. In the first generation there will be some dozens of intelligent young mulattoes, much superior in average intelligence to the negroes. We might expect the throne for some generations to be occupied by a more or less yellow king; but can anyone believe that the whole island will gradually acquire a white, or even a yellow population …?
Here is a case in which a variety was introduced, with far greater advantages than any sport every heard of, advantages tending to its preservation, and yet powerless to perpetuate the new variety.
– North British Review, June 1867, 46:277-318.
Darwin said that this objection gave him more trouble than any other. “Blending inheritance” indeed contradicts Natural Selection obliging Darwin to propose his alternative model of “particulate inheritance”. Darwin suggested a hypothesis called Pangenesis, in which parts of the body emitted “gemmules” that accumulated via the circulatory system in the gonads. Heredity has something to do with “bloodlines”.
Francis Galton the great Victorian polymath (and Darwin’s cousin) experimented with different lines of rabbits and determined that blood transfusions did not change their inheritance. http://galton.org/hereditarian.html
Of course, not all organisms have circulatory systems, so Darwin invoked other means of transport were also possible such as simple diffusion, but clearly his theory was in trouble.
Modification of inherited characters as selected by natural selection would then require modification these gemmules. How were these gemmules to be modified? Darwin proposed that parental response to the environment impacted gemmules which were then passed on to the next generation. This is starting to sound a lot like what modern textbooks incorrectly call Lamarckism.
To make matters even worse, the great Lord Kelvin (in whose great honor a brand new temperature scale had been named) toppled the other pillar of Evolutionary Theory; namely “geological time”. Shortly after Darwin’s publication, Lord Kelvin calculated the age of Earth to be a mere 20 million to 400 million years. Our planet at some point was a molten sphere, which means it must still be relatively early in its process of cooling. Kelvin’s calculations were indeed precise, but grossly inaccurate; as they failed to account for the heat generated by radioactive decay.
The inexorable accumulation of stable and heritable variability constituted one half of Darwin’s great Theory. Natural Selection constituted the other. Darwin and his supporters knew Evolutionary Theory just had to be true. If Victorian English farmers can produce novel breeds of pigeons or dogs; then, Natural Selection can produce new species! The devil was in the details, requiring resolution by pursuing further scientific inquiry. The millstones of scientific progress sometimes grind slowly. Another fifty years were required before neo-Darwinism rose again like a phoenix.
The specious Darwin vs. Lamarck dichotomy so often misrepresented in current textbooks is really a vestige of a much later Neo-Darwinism vs. Neo-Lamarckism debate that actually occurred latter in the 20th Century. Several historians, including Stephen Jay Gould, have contended that modern textbooks unjustly deal Lamarck a bad rap. Not only did Jean-Baptiste Lamarck coin the new verb “evolve”; Lamarck was also the first naturalist brave enough to publicly conjecture that human beings had evolved from apes (Philosophie zoologique, 1809)
Lamarck believed that a change in an animal’s habits eventually resulted in a change of heritable of characteristics; a response acquired through “effort” or “will”. (Remember those hungry giraffes stretching their necks.) Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (a colleague of Lamarck) took his line of reasoning one step further: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire suggested heritable changes could also include more direct responses to the environment such as the inheritance of characteristics through use or disuse. At this point, vocabulary becomes confusing enough to require a flow chart: “Geoffroyism” and “Lamarckism” have both been subsumed into the compass of what Ernst Mayer would later call “soft inheritance”. Regrettably, various versions of “soft inheritance”, with all their disparate nuances and subtleties (including a conditional embrace of “Natural Selection”) have since been incorrectly labeled as “Lamarckism” (more on that later).
Darwin’s original “Pangenesis” in many ways resembles Lamarck’s (and Geoffroy’s) version of events. Darwin took for granted the now discredited idea of the “effects of use and disuse”. Darwin however did part paths with Lamarck on one key point: Lamarck embraced metaphysics, by imagining evolution to be a goal-driven process or “teleological”. Another name for this misconception textbooks often identify as “Lamarckism” often has another name: i.e. “Orthogenesis”, a version of events espoused by many 19th Century Naturalists such as the celebrated Ernst Haeckel of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” fame.
Darwin on the other hand correctly recognized the capricious randomness of the natural order. Darwin recognized that Evolution does not correspond to some specious “vector of progress”, otherwise known as the “Scala Naturae” as espoused by Lamarck, Haeckel and many other Naturalists even as recently as Teilhard de Chardin in the 1950s.
Great post. I predict it will be ignored.
Well, not in the first edition.
Glen Davidson
Correct – thank you.
I would also like to point out a typo:
It would appear I do my best editing after hitting “ENTER”.
Darwin also noticed that gender was non-blending. In a letter, IIRC, documented in Dawkins’s TGSOE.
LOL! From some corners – that would constitute a compliment of the highest order and a concession of YEC defeat.
😉
Hi Allan
I would appreciate a link if you could find it. The erroneous notion of blending inheritance was particularly difficult to discard.
Another consummate racist of the Victorian era was William Bateson who provided the “Eureka Moment” upon reading Mendel that some credit as the launching of Modern Genetics.
Interesting story that – maybe another future post.
Darwin had a theory? Really? Where’s the math? Science requires quantification
Are you quite sure? My impression is that it was the general belief among both scientists and the public for hundreds or thousands of years previous to Darwin, and certainly Lamarck is included. Darwin just went along with it and was not an innovator.
Darwin’s main contributions were two: 1) natural selection and 2) the concept of a branching tree of descent. Would you agree?
Technically true, I suppose. But wouldn’t “evolved” count? It’s the very last word.
I noted also Darwin saw acquired traits during a life would be passed on to kids. in fact my recent threads about women was case in point about this option for Darwin.
i think many things from Darwin and company would not get in the textbooks. i don’t find the island thing racist or outrageous. Just wrong but many people then and now see race as biologically affecting iQ. Not creationists obviously but most educated people today would agree IQ is inherited at least somewhat. so race/sex is just another step.
Evolutionism can’t get around it.
This YEC does thing biology gets triggered to acquired new traits . We need it.
Then passed on to kids .
We need this especially to explain things like human colour etc. Its impossible it evolved. it must of happened upon migration to a area and the whole living population changed instanty.
Thank you for catching me on that. I was thinking in terms of Lamarck vs. Darwin. You will notice above that I also cited Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a contemporary of Lamarck.
But you are correct – I could have parsed my words more carefully. After all, Robert Edmond Grant (Darwin’s teacher in Edinborough) shared the evolutionist ideas of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire on evolution by acquired characteristics.
I disagree. I think various versions of “evolution” preceded Darwin including his grandfather’s Erasmus Darwin. Meanwhile Lamarck first coined the term evolve/evolution while also suggesting human beings had “evolved” from apes.
Darwin’s GREAT contribution was his overt embrace of a non-theist (i.e. not atheist) insight in to the workings of Nature, despite the impediment of his Theological Training at a time in when most naturalists in England were clergymen, who also saw it as part of their duties to “explore the wonders of God’s creation”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_White
Darwin managed to reject Vitalism and Teleology at a time when other Naturalists were unable to do so. That was his Great contribution IMHO. I suspect we are quibbling.
Damn! I wonder if that last word was present in the First Edition… but no matter – I still acknowledge my mistake.
Let’s see if we can distill a meta-lesson here.
I made a mistake! I publically acknowledge as much.
I thank John Harshman for correcting me. I wonder if this post could serve as a model to others present?
again thanks
I think that Darwin’s heresy was importing geological uniformitarianism into biology, with selection as the cause of continuous incremental change and divergence.
Change, even common descent had been toyed with since the Greeks, but Darwin borrowed deep time from geology to make small, incremental changes work to produce new types.
The pathetic details are still being worked out.
Biology and geology were ahead of physics on the business of deep time.
Hmmm…
I wonder if Erasmus Darwin and others had not yet already managed to successfully speculate on such lines.
ITMT – Darwin would not have needed Huxley as his “bulldog” were it not for Darwin’s heresy of removing God’s creative intercession as some “necessary cause” (or in Aristotelian terms – “Final Cause”) in a metaphysical or teleological sense as Haeckel and other “woolly-headed” German Naturphilosophen persistently wanted to press. Ergo my admiration for August Weismann.
I think that represented Darwin’s (and later Weismann’s version of Neo-Darwinism) great break with Lamarck and others.
I think you underestimate the degree to which Darwin’s tree marked a break with previous ideas of evolution. Lamarck, for example, envisioned evolution as independent progression of lineages along a single track with a few switching points and some local variation, with the main differences among species being that some had started earlier along that track and some later. Darwin was the first to propose universal common descent and divergence.
And denying that natural selection was one of his major contributions? I’m speechless.
Hi John, I am convinced you are incorrect on this one.
For example, Charles Darwin’s grandfather (Erasmus Darwin) had already waxed eloquent on how life evolved from a single common ancestor, forming “one living filament”.
Checkout
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/Edarwin.html
Of course, Charles Darwin took that notion further with “branching filaments”.
Meanwhile, Pierre Louis Maupertuis had already suggested that life had diverged through random variation and natural selection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Louis_Maupertuis
There were many others including Immanuel Kant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_descent#History
I think you underestimate two important considerations:
1 – the resilience of spiritual or metaphysical overtones to 19th Century scientific thought, sometimes referred to as “vitalism”.
2 – the contributions of Charles Darwin’s predecessors regarding the specifics of natural selection.
Charles Darwin conceded his debt to Edward Blyth. Blyth attempted “to show how [selection and the struggle for existence] can be used to explain, not the change of species (which he was anxious to discredit) but the stability of species in which he ardently believed.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection#Pre-Darwinian_theories
Meanwhile, I already mentioned Pierre Louis Maupertuis had already suggested that life had diverged through random variation and natural selection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Louis_Maupertuis
So Bottom Line, is natural selection
1 – a major contribution? Yes!
2 – exclusively Charles Darwin’s contribution? No!
3 – Charles Darwin’s most important contribution? Again no!
How is it that Darwin succeeded where Blyth and so many before had failed? Darwin correctly recognized the capricious randomness of the natural order. Darwin recognized that Evolution does not correspond to some specious “vector of progress”, otherwise known as the “Scala Naturae” as espoused by his predecessors’ bizarre and persistent Neo-Platonic/Aristotlelian theories that included Haeckel’s Biogenetic Law not to mention various versions of “Orthogenesis” that presumed some innate teleological “arrow of progress” that was somehow driving evolution.
Hindsight permits a modern, but decidedly unfair chuckle, at the expense of earlier efforts to make sense of the Natural World.
Ironically, Darwin’s solid grounding in divinity training enabled him to totally reject all such metaphysical speculation out of hand. Natural Selection alone explained, for example; how moles, still possessing rudimentary eyes could lose the sight their ancestors once possessed…
… or how parasites, formerly free-living, could become degenerate both in form and function while inflicting great suffering upon their hosts. Darwin’s great insight (as embraced again later, by August Weismann) was to acknowledge the evident lack of direction, “intelligent design” or moral order to the Natural World.
Perhaps, the loss of his 10 year old daughter to childhood disease buttressed Darwin’s lack of faith in any putative interventions by a merciful Deity on our plane of existence.
THAT IMHO – was Charles Darwin’s great contribution, even necessitating the recruitment of Huxley as his protective “bulldog”.
It seems pretty clear that taken individually. all of Darwin’s ideas were “in the air.”
I don’t think any other single person or school of thought combined:
1: Deep Time
2. Cousinship of all living things
3. Nearly imperceptible change per generation, accumulating to create new species.
4. Geographical isolation leading to speciation
5. Selection as the shaper of populations, rather than intentional design. (Adam Smith)
6. Unguided variation (Sports)
7. Necessity of fecundity (Malthus)
8. Change as an attribute of populations rather than of individuals.
hmmm… let’s say that is so
…so then why did Charles Darwin succeed where others before him had failed?
I think that may remain my only point of disagreement with John Harshman.
I think Darwin’s greatest contribution was losing the shackles of metaphysical & theological conjecture from natural science. I think that was his greatest FIRST!
check out my scribbles on
best
Laplace?
My point is I don’t think Darwin was the first to suggest any particular hypothesis. But he assembled all the bits and pieces, making a non-theological approach possible.
It doesn’t matter that he was wrong or incomplete about details. He made the approach practical.
Look at the poor ID/creationists. They have been beaten to death on fossils, beaten to death on genetics, beaten to death on common descent, beaten to death on deep time, beaten to death on complexity.
What they have left — their last refuge — is biogenesis. The last gap.
It has been decades since I last heard the name “Laplace”.
I will need to refresh:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/
Just the same, I do not believe that Laplace’s atheism supports your thesis and contradicts what I am saying.
Remember that Calvin was no less deterministic than Laplace.
ITMT – even a god-free universe could still prove teleological. Perhaps the increasing complexity engendered by entropy is constrained along certain directional lines somehow.
Fact remains, 19th Century thinkers referred to in German as Naturphilosophen (in English simply Naturalists) were encumbered by metaphysics and Darwin indeed broke those chains for the first time along the lines you yourself just posted.
I don’t see that we are disagreeing.
I just think that without Darwin’s massive assembly of facts and hypotheses, the divorce wouldn’t have gone through. No one or two pieces is sufficient.
TomMueller,
I reject both Erasmus Darwin and Maupertuis as important precursors to Darwin’s two main ideas. E. Darwin never developed that “filament” into a coherent notion of branching descent, and that’s what Darwin’s contribution is; I really do think he was the first person to consider a tree of descent, e.g. his first famous scribbled tree in his notes and the one and only figure in the Origin. Nothing you have mentioned is a real precursor to those. As for natural selection, Maupertuis is at best a far-fetched choice. Rather, he seems to be talking about random assembly of animals, only some of which have all the ingredients needed for survival; natural selection of sorts, perhaps, but nothing like what Darwin was talking about. Blyth is much better, but as you note he avoided any application of the principle to evolution. Darwin’s innovation is not the idea of selection itself, but the idea that it could result in evolution, including divergence between populations.
As for Darwin being the first to assume natural processes rather than divine intervention, did Lamarck actually invoke god? Cuvier certainly did, but it seems to me that Lamarck relied purely on natural forces; they just happen to be natural forces that don’t actually exist.
So I’m sticking to my claims.
John (and Tom): Lamarck did have a branching tree, though he was forced into it by not being able to make a Great Chain of Being fit the data. (Stephen Jay Gould has a nice essay “A Tree Grows in Paris” on this).
Reading Lamarck closely, there is a clue. In Philosophie Zoologique he describes two views. One is the previous view, in which Nature or its creator creates species separately. The other is his own view. Here he uses the term “Nature” while leaving out the creator entirely.
So there is every reason to believe that Lamarck was a Deist, and did not invoke a creator to do anything.
Agreed. But his branching tree was only slightly branched, and it wasn’t intended as a tree of common descent but as a trackway along which species progressed over time, after having originated separately. The branchings didn’t represent ancestral divergences but switch points in the track.
Indeed Darwin brought in geology. Without the geology assumptions the biology doesn’t work.
In fact thats a fatal logical flaw in evolutionism.
It makes no case for bio evo without the crutch of geo.
Therefore evo is not based on bio evidence. Without the geo it has no case in just observing biology or fossilized biology.
When I read Darwin he is a one trick pony to me.
the reason he got confident he was right about evolution was he was confident that small steps can bridge the primitive with the complicated. He did this first in geology and after bio evo he did it in human expressions and many things.
Darwin was not a product of others ideas.
As I read him he had a insight that all could be explained from manipulation of small details.
He was right and he was wrong. Yet it was his intellectual eureka movement.
Thats why he did the best job and still his stuff is better then modern evolutionists. If one reasds it carefully. Which they don’t.
Hi Joe, thank you for weighing in. You will remember that I mentioned Gould in the original OP.
Regarding Lamarck’s religious views: a number of sources confirm Lamarck was a Deist who discounted God’s intervention in Nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Baptiste_Lamarck#Religious_views
Rereading Gould on Lamarck was very revealing and I agree with Gould that Lamarck was given a bad rap.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/archive/stephen_jay_gould/gould_division-worms2.html
Lamarck originally postulated a « ladder of Descent » where abiogeneisis occurred at least twice and not just once. However, he later abandoned that line of speculation.
Here is Gould in his own words:
So where exactly did Lamarck and Darwin differ?
Lamarck still maintained to the end there still existed some metaphysical “vector of progress” but conceded late in his career that this vector was now subservient to the same “local circumstances” of selection as Darwin later proposed.
Here is Gould again on Lamarck’s ephiphany:
So Lamarck did not entirely abandon metaphysical laws, eg. “a vector to greater complexity”; Lamarck instead eventually recognized that such metaphysical laws were no longer “a predominant prime cause”.
Bottom Line (and I repeat) :
1 – Darwin was NOT the first to propose universal common descent and divergence. Darwin’s and Lamarck’s ToL were not different.
2 – Darwin’s greatest contribution was losing the shackles of metaphysical & theological conjecture from natural science. That was his greatest FIRST!
Hi John – being a Canadian teacher, I am able to read the original French.
I can see where you are coming from – but I assure you that your interpretation does not accord with the original French.
The crux of the matter lies in how one translates the expression: “la combinaison fortuite des productions de la nature”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy would seem to accord with my interpretation how Maupertuis speculated along the similar lines to Darwin regarding “the transformation of species”.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-to-1872/
Alas, there was a difference: Maupertuis, like his contemporaries, invoked a metaphysical version of vitalism where Darwin did not. That said, Maupertuis still seems to be talking Natural Selection.
TomMueller,
It seems to me that instead of the phrase you cite, which can be interpreted many ways, the key is in his examples: animals without mouths or reproductive organs. That has absolutely nothing to do with Darwin’s observations of the variability of natural populations and the ability of the environment to select among numerous slight variations. Whether in French or in English, it looks like some ancient philosopher’s views of spontaneous generation than anything else. Didn’t Lucretius or someone imagine a random combination of parts in the beginning?
TomMueller,
Unlike you, I don’t read French and am reduced to secondary sources. But Wikipedia summarizes what those sources have generally told me about Lamarck’s view of life: “Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) produced the first branching tree of animals in his Philosophie Zoologique (1809). It was an upside-down tree starting with worms and ending with mammals. However, Lamarck did not believe in common descent of all life. Instead, he believed that life consists of separate parallel lines advancing from simple to complex.”
This isn’t talking about just one or even two lineages but about countless ones, continually arising and proceeding down the track, which explains why different species are now at different points.
Perhaps we could narrow the focus to Darwin’s discussion of tiny, nearly invisible variations, which expert plant and animal breeders use to select breeding stock.
It is tiny variations that Darwin argues are the grist for both artificial and natural selection. I don’t know if anyone prior to Darwin thought of variation as fine grained.
There was, for many years after Origin, a debate about saltation.
Hi John,
I think where Maupertuis differs from Darwin is that Maupertuis invokes the frequent spontaneous generation of new kinds of animals and plants, together with massive elimination of deficient forms. Maupertuis, thereby avoids the need for special creation which remains constant. Still, you are correct that Maupertuis’ version seems to be very much akin to Goldschmidt’s “Hopeful Monsters” more so than Darwin’s gradualism.
Is that close but not close enough?
Here is what your Wikipedia article says on Maupertuis:
Maybe that’s a judgment call.
According to my reading of …
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evolution-to-1872/
… I think Maupertuis deserves some credit for anticipating modern theory. His naïve version of genetics and embryology seems remarkably similar to Darwin’s pangenesis.
To summarize: Maupertuis maintained that species are not specially created by an Intelligent Designer, species do not remain genetically constant, which all allows for the transformation of species over time.
That merits a blip on my radar. In any case, my OP was more focused on Lamarck vs Darwin.
I need to respectfully disagree. Perhaps you missed Joe Felsenstein’s and my own citation of Gould whose command of French is impeccable.
Your Wikipedia citation refers to Lamarck’s writing in 1809
Note the dates of Gould’s citations already mentioned above:
In other words, your Wikipedia citation does not give credit to Lamarck’s later epiphany. Forget 1809 – even 1815 is not good enough!
Gould directs out attention to Lamarck’s 1820 book:
I direct your attention to Joe’s original post above and my follow-up:
Bottom Line (and I repeat) :
1 – Darwin was NOT the first to propose universal common descent and divergence. Darwin’s and Lamarck’s ToL were not different.
2 – Darwin’s greatest contribution was losing the shackles of metaphysical & theological conjecture from natural science. That was his greatest FIRST!
The intellectual incest of textbooks (which now include wikipedia) copying each other’s errors requires redress!
Hi Petrushka
I agree that Darwin was a gradualist.
Natura non facit saltus … and all that.
The resurrection of Darwinian theory eventually coupled to Mendelian Theory was vehemently opposed by so-called Saltationists is a fascinating history and worthy of examination, I agree.
TomMueller,
I don’t accept Gould as the final authority on Lamarck. He was as capable of misreading as anyone. For one thing, he talks about reducing two lineages to one, but Lamarck was talking about hundreds or thousands of lineages. Given a force for progressive evolution, frequent spontaneous generation is the only way for there still to be simple organisms in the present day, and Lamarck’s ideas could not be self-consistent without that.
The Wikipedia reference is to Peter J. Bowler (2003) Evolution: The History of an Idea. I’m not willing to dismiss Bowler’s reading in favor of Gould’s without more evidence.
Hi again John
Here yet another relevant quote from Gould:
But I accept your challenge – if you provide me the 1820 original in the French (you can contact me by the handy messenger feature of this site) I will provide an easily verifiable synoptic translation for everyone’s benefit.
ITMT – between gentlemen, I am willing to offer you odds on a friendly wage involving beer when we finally sit together in person (hopefully not too far in the future) that Gould got Lamarck right.
best regards
TomMueller,
You have as much (or as little) access to the 1820 original as I have. If you accept my challenge, go ahead and find it. I’d be interested in the text of his 1815 model too. Bowler discusses only the 1809 formulation in detail, though he also references the others. Neither changes his position.
Here’s an online edition of all Lamarck’s books.
I’m on vacation (in Spain) and don’t have any books with me, but I remember thinking that–at least in one essay–Gould seemed to me to mischaracterize Lamarck by suggesting that he did not need to utilize some sort of principle of natural selection to the same extent that Darwin did. As I read him (mostly as filtered through Butler), Lamarck’s theory was just as dependent on survival of the fittest as was Darwin’s. It was just that Lamarck–and later Lamarckians–did not believe that natural selection together with the occasional, entirely random mutation, were sufficient to produce the varieties of organisms he saw. So he postulated an ADDITIONAL (and really inexplicable) mechanism involving striving and the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics.
FWIW, it seems to me that if there’s a God necessary there, it’s only to explain the (really large) gap. It’s not an intrinsically theological story, I don’t think, which is one reason why it came to be so popular with Marxists. The strivings of the people, you know, can never be defeated.
What!? You travel without a Kindle?
p.s. I think you can download books to your phone these days.
walto, I have not looked at Lamarck’s 1815 or 1820 publications, but I have looked over Philosophie Zoologique of 1809. I did not ever see anything about natiural selection in it. (People can read it online here).
Can you provide an example of where Lamarck’s work shows that he argued for natural selection as an evolutionary mechanism?
Also, Lamarck’s tree may have become a unified one later, but it still has big differences from Darwin’s. I gather that Lamarck did not allow for extinction, and thought that if a species went extinct it would be re-evolved from its immediate ancestors. That is very different from Darwin’s view — the tree in Lamarck’s case is more like a path along which mutation proceeds, and can even re-proceed.
Darwin also hedged his bets as to how many origins of life there were — I believe that he said one or a few, though probably one.
Hi again John
I quickly glanced through Lamarck’s Système analytique des connaissances positives de l’homme, 1820.
Yikes, Lamarck’s prose is quite florid and I can find no other translation other than Gould’s
Here goes:
Here is my translation :
Lamarck goes on to present a branching cladogram that is no different from Darwin’s as far as I can see:
Lamarck then proceeds to list the interconnections of the various invertebrates on his single cladogram.
… continuing after a “hiatus” to vertebrates as apparently derived from this same Monad mentioned earlier.
Lamarck continues the cladogram to include humans at some sort of apex:
His summarizing paragraph should interest you:
I note with satisfaction that « la production des animaux par la nature » is identical to how Maupertuis phrased it earlier.
Here is my translation:
Gould got it right! No surprises really!
OK let’s be fair here. In 1859, Darwin did speculate that
I can find no mention whether Lamarck considers whether is some last universal ancestor (LUA), some Monad for all other Monads. But hey, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Maybe Lamarck drew the line on speculation. After all, only in retrospect can we discount the eventuality that life arose more than once on our planet and Darwin really went out on a limb here (pun intended).
It doesn’t matter. Gould’s version of Lamarck is closer to the truth than Peter J. Bowler’s from my reading of the original French.
In 1820 Lamarck no longer subscribed to his earlier thinking described in his 1809 book Philosophie Zoologique
http://www.vetopsy.fr/comportement/evolution/images/lamarck-classification-3.gif
I think some people may be confusing adaptation in direct response to the environment, Lamarck’s view, with Darwin’s view of natural selection, which is adaption resulting from environmental influence on which randomly occurring variations are retained. The two have nothing in common except the result — adaption — and the word “environment”.
maybe
not me…
to whom were you referring?
TomMueller,
Yes, It certainly seems from this short passage that Lamarck had abandoned his earlier theory. But now he has a problem: if new “infusoria” are not constantly arising from the muck, how can they still be around given his theory of an innate drive toward perfection? Does he abandon that drive too, or does he fail to reconcile the contradiction?
Hi again John
I just got back from an errand and looked over my rushed translation.
I realize I may have made some errors; les faux-amis anglais-français i.e misleading cognates in English-French translation.
For example:
I am not certain “terme” is best translated as “term” as in “word” and I may be missing a poetic nuance of “intentionality” on the part of Nature.
I will ask someone who speaks French as a first language.
Bottom line remains unchanged. I always conceded Lamarck was excessively metaphysical in his Weltbild.
Hi Joe,
I found your comment intriguing and I followed up.
You are correct – Darwin did “hedge his bets”!
I found a neat site that provides a synoptic rendition of his various editions of Origins and how it evolved.
check out this real cool link!!!
http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/1859/1859-484-c-1872.html
vs 1872
Forgive any misperception of hubris on my part… but I think Gould is correct on this score.
Take away the Lamarck’s metaphysics and he begins to sound remarkably similar to Darwin… or vice versa.
Hi John
I believe the problem you mention was not unique to Lamarck but a problem for all Naturalists until Pasteur settled it with his famous Swan-Neck bottle experiments in 1859.
… coincidentally, the same year that Darwin first published his Origins book. Of course, Darwin’s manuscript was written long before.
Then I don’t think you have understood what the problem is. It’s not a belief in spontaneous generation. It’s that frequent spontaneous generation is necessary to reconcile a) deep time, b) Lamarck’s drive toward perfection, and c) the current existence of “simple” organisms. That is, the simple organisms of the past have become the complex organisms of today and so can’t be ancestral to the simple organisms of today.
Also, whether the problem was unique to Lamarck is irrelevant to anything we’re discussing here, which is to what degree Lamarck’s views were similar to Darwin’s. I think you’re making up in your head what I’m trying to say rather than reading carefully.