Search Results

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a biological visionary, the first biologist to articulate a comprehensive theory of organic evolution that claimed that all the different forms of life on earth had been successively developed from the simplest to the most complex. Though he is famous for promoting the idea of the inheritance of acquired characters, his theory of evolution was much broader than that. This chapter explores Lamarck’s evolutionary theorizing and relates it to multiple factors, including his penchant for constructing broad, explanatory systems and his switch into a new position and field – professor of invertebrate zoology at the Muséum d’histoire naturelle in Paris – midway through his career.

Paris was the most important centre for evolutionary speculations in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Two of its most influential evolutionary thinkers, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire both worked there in the city’s Museum of Natural History. This chapter explores the impact of these French thinkers’ theories in Edinburgh and the close connections that existed between natural history circles in the two cities. It was common for students and graduates of the medical school of the University of Edinburgh to spend time studying in Paris, where they imbibed many of the exciting new ideas being discussed there. Two of the key figures discussed in this book, Robert Grant and Robert Knox, had both spent time in Paris and were deeply influenced by the theories they encountered there. The chapter also examines the impact of the key writings of Lamarck and Geoffroy in Edinburgh.

This chapter talks about the earliest decades of the scientific study of “transmutation,” previously called evolution, in which early evolutionists focused on the search for a natural causal explanation for the origin of species alive today. The two contrasting positions that have dominated evolutionary thought came from two naturalists who based their theories on empirical data drawn from a comparison of fossil mollusks—Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Giambattista Brocchi. The chapter examines the ideas of both Lamarck and Brocchi, most of which were published in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, which was founded by Robert Jameson. Jameson was Charles Darwin's teacher at the University of Edinburgh. Darwin's exposure to scientific analysis, natural history, and transmutational thinking continued at Cambridge where he read John Herschel's Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy, a book that influenced him to pursue a scientific career.

This chapter provides an overview of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's life and his works, including his theories and contributions to evolutionary thought. Lamarck' s theories were expounded in his central writings, especially in the Philosophie zoologique and in Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres. Lamarck considered himself as one of the many naturalists who believed that the development of an organ during the lifetime of an organism, or the appearance of behavioral characteristics could be passed to an offspring if mating occurred between individuals that had experienced the same change. Overall, this chapter draws a historical portrait of Lamarck, dispelling the myths surrounding his life and career.

This chapter focuses on research conducted at the Paris Museum of Natural History or Museum d’Histoire Naturelle in the decades following its founding in 1793. Located at a longstanding botanical garden and natural history collection, the post-revolutionary museum became a site where specimens gathered from around the world by French explorers, sailors, traders, and colonists—as well as specimens acquired from other European nations over the course of the Napoleonic wars—could be classified, compared, and subjected to experiment. Through this research, the chapter argues, Parisian naturalists such as Georges Cuvier, André Thouin, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire produced an extensive body of knowledge about how the structure and function of each kind of living being corresponded to the conditions under which it typically lived. By the mid-nineteenth century, they were increasingly describing this correspondence in terms of organisms (organismes) and their environments (milieux)—a conceptual distinction that was soon adopted by researchers far beyond the museum itself.

This chapter introduces readers to the key problem of “epigenesis” in both Romantic biopoetics and the history of biology in general. Romantic aesthetics and biology are frequently said to converge in the ideal of “organic form”: the organism or artwork as autonomous, self-organizing whole. But William Blake’s The First Book of Urizen, for instance, satirically demolishes this vitalist depiction of life as the power to self-organize. Putting Blake into dialogue with contemporary zoologists Erasmus Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the chapter reconstructs an unfamiliar, materialist theory of epigenesis that is rooted in embryonic receptivity, rather than vital power. Here viable morphology is an archive of a being’s successive con-formations with its material and social surround – a notion of living form that ultimately challenges vitalism’s ongoing tendency to cast the life of the body as that which resists or evades symbolic structuration. “Epigenesis, an epilogue” sketches how these formerly heretical Romantic and “Lamarckian” ideas are enjoying a revival in the “epigenetic” corrective to the genetic determinism of twentieth-century evolutionary biology.

This chapter begins the story by exploring how the idea of extinction emerged as a biological concept in the nineteenth century. Despite the current ubiquity of the term, extinction challenged earlier notions of the stability of nature and the benevolence of a creator god. When naturalists first determined that the geological record revealed that a great many species which had formerly existed have become extinct, new ideas about the "balance of nature" had to be developed that could account for extinction as a process contributing to overall natural stability. Two of the central characters in this chapter are Georges Cuvier, who was responsible for confirming the empirical fact of extinction and who developed a "catastrophic" model of geo-historical change, and Charles Lyell, whose view that extinction is an ordinary feature of natural history had an enormous influence on later understandings of the relationship between extinction and biological diversity.

This article reconstructs the history and significance of hierarchical thinking in evolutionary theory, suggesting further development of hierarchical approaches in evolutionary biology. Darwin’s intellectual background was imbued with ideas on the nature of species and on the causal mechanisms of species origin and extinction. Important in informing Darwin's hierarchical thinking was Giambattista Brocchi's analogy between species and organisms with respect to individuality, birth, and death. This imprint shined through Darwin’s observations on differential extinction rates, geographic replacements, and other biogeographical patterns. Following the discovery of natural selection, Darwin came to consider species as ephemeral entities whose apparent individuality was an artifact of the imperfections of the fossil record. The subsequent gradualist nonhierarchical view of evolution was challenged in the 1930s by Dobzhansky and then Mayr, who resurrected hierarchical thinking by pointing out the reality of species as distinct biological entities. The 1972 punctuated equilibria hypothesis by Eldredge and Gould suggested the connection between the process of allopatric speciation and the pattern of apparent species stability and abrupt origin as documented by the fossil record. Today hierarchy theory accommodates strong empirical evidence for stasis and speciation and against exclusive gradualism, improving our understanding of structure and dynamics of the biological world.

This chapter talks about evolution and its existence, although evolutionary theorizing didn't really rise above the status of a pseudoscience. People could see only too clearly that evolution existed on the back of what many considered the very iffy ideology of cultural progress. One mark was the way in which non-professionals like Robert Chambers felt free to plunge right in with their ideas, as though they had spent their lives working in the laboratory or out in the field. It also discusses the leading professional biologist to get tangled up with ideas of evolution, French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, who published his speculations in his Philosophie Zoologique in 1809. That he was an enthusiast for cultural progress is shown if only by the fact that, although a minor aristocrat, it was during the revolution that his career really took off. He became a world-leading invertebrate taxonomist, a scientist of deserved respect, and as such was brought right up against the issue of the end-directed nature of the features of organisms.

This chapter focuses on the ways British socialists interpreted evolution. As Fabianism and Marxism became more prominent, the Lamarkian and anti-Malthusian politics of men like William Morris and Peter Kropotkin became increasingly marginalized. H.G. Wells, a one-time admirer of Morris and sometime Fabian, took particular exception to Morris's anti-Malthusian assumptions. This became all the more so in light of his conviction that the German cell biologist August Weismann had undermined Lamarckian inheritance. Without the inheritance of acquired characters any hope of a significant human evolution on a relevant time scale was lost. Further, Wells became convinced that Weismann's theory of panmixia further undermined Morris's vision of socialism. Any ‘epoch of rest’ that ameliorated selective pressure would cause biological degeneration. George Bernard Shaw, was as Malthusian as Wells, but intervened to oppose Wells'sWeismannism. An ardent Lamarckian Shaw ultimately reflected that Morris might have been right.

This chapter explores the Franco-German contexts in which the law of correlation originated, and also considers how Cuvier’s law was used to thwart the transmutationism of Lamarck. It examines Cuvier’s rhetorical presentation of his law, and his significant silence on religion. With a particular focus on Edinburgh and translations of Cuvier’s anatomical and geological writings, the chapter shows how, in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars, there was a myriad of different, and often competing, interpretations of the savant, whose works could be repackaged to endorse both conservative and radical, as well as religious and heretical purposes. The law of correlation itself was often more amenable to the interests of radical materialists than to conservative theologians looking to bolster revealed theology.