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Chapter 2 explores the epic of an evolving universe in order to understand the entities, structures, and processes that disclose the nature, attributes, and purposes of its Creator. This exploration investigates insights regarding the origin of the cosmos and engages scientific theories that challenge classical conceptions of the God‐world relationship. It focuses on Darwinian and neo‐Darwinian theories that suggest an ongoing creativity immanent in the cosmos itself. It probes the interaction of law and chance that suggests freedom and autonomy inherent in the evolving cosmos and that raises questions concerning the operation of divine omnipotence and omniscience in relation to cosmic events. Arriving at the conclusion that such cosmic freedom and autonomy implies an intrinsic measure of risk, pain, suffering, and even death for its creatures and its Creator, this exploration finds itself in an inexorable movement toward the inference of the suffering of God in, with, and under the suffering of the cosmos.

This chapter examines how both first- and second-cohort pragmatists participated in the debates over the causal factors of evolution that accompanied the reception of August Weismann’s work in the 1890s. Weismann, a biologist, argued in the mid-1880s that the hereditary substance was confined to what he called the “germ-plasm,” which was isolated from the rest of the body. One implication was that acquired characteristics could not be inherited, undermining the neo-Lamarckian theories of American scientists such as Edward Drinker Cope and Henry Fairfield Osborn. These discussions were of interest to William James and Charles Sanders Peirce because of their opposition to Herbert Spencer (also a neo-Lamarckian) and Peirce’s 1893 essay “Evolutionary Love” should be interpreted as contributing to the factors of evolution debates. John Dewey also followed these debates, applying key concepts from an 1893–95 dispute between Spencer and Weismann to his early work in ethics and social psychology.

This chapter analyses the medical market place represented by the proliferation of get-fit manuals, home gymnasium equipment, and body culture generally. This was a field marked by faith in natural remedies and an holist commitment to the ‘whole man’ as well as a desire to manage fatigue. The chapter stresses how physical culturists perceived a crisis of European civilization in which the comforts of modern living had eroded the physical basis of masculine supremacy, and how they urged ‘rational’ exercise to recover traditional systems of sex-difference. It explores how a dynamic of class difference paradoxically served to homogenize a muscular manly ideal; and how both classical and primitivist aesthetic norms functioned in reinforcing racial hierarchies. The chapter also explains how a neo-Lamarckian understanding of the heredity of acquired characteristics underpinned the widespread eugenicist convictions among physical culturists that exercise could regenerate the ‘race’.

This chapter addresses how the politics of the revolutionary era charged the intellectual debates and institutional rivalries that were agitating the emergent science of the forms of life, centered now in Paris. Arguing for the reform of knowledge as a necessary condition of political reform, scientific authors opposed to the Bourbon regime rallied around Lamarckism, and transformist natural history more broadly, throughout the 1820s. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's protégé Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, emerging as a leading light of the liberal movement, made monstrosity a key research program of the new philosophical anatomy. Geoffroy sought to reaffirm the orderliness of nature by insisting that monstrosities were natural phenomena, subject to natural law-deviations, on classifiable principles, from the archetypal regularity of the species, itself subject to the grand law of “unity of organic composition.” At the same time, monstrosity provided a mechanism for the transformation of species. The chapter then looks at examples of historical fiction and romances that feature powers beyond human nature, such as Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris.

During the so-called eclipse of the Darwinism period, in which neo-Lamarckian ideas overtook Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, species were often thought to be types again. This chapter focuses on the non-Darwinian ideas that became prominent after the period of Darwinism. It discusses orthogenetic Lamarckism, bathmism, and the Baldwin Effect. It also describes Johannes Paulus Lotsy's work, which proposes the evolution of species by hybridization. It also examines the role played by the species concepts in the thinking of several German-speaking biologists in the early part of the twentieth century. In particular, the views of Erwin Stresemann are influential. He claimed that morphology as a criterion of species had been abandoned in favor of physiological divergence, as evidenced by reproductive isolation.

Following recent scholarship it is clear that Herbert Spencer was no social Darwinist, rather his Lamarckian politics reflected an appreciation of the radicalism of William Godwin and Erasmus Darwin. Unlike many Whigs Spencer was ambivalent about Malthus's claim that population would outstrip resources. In his “Theory of Population” Spencer explained that the struggle for existence would drive the development of human intelligence as people exercised and thereby increased their mental capacities. In doing so they would deplete the neurine in their brains. Citing respected contemporary physiologists Spencer believed neurine was the same chemical substance that fuelled sexual desire, thus solving the Malthusian dilemma. In Social Statics and other early works Spencer articulated limited government as the basis of a progressive evolution towards a utopian socialist future, it was only later, when contemporary socialists embraced statist solutions to social problems, that he drew back from these conclusions.

The embodiment of difference in patterns of relationship between the organism and its environment is the means through which living forms create their own organization. Morphogenesis, like other developmental processes, is self-organizing and its study demonstrates how the whole enters into the parts of the whole and why its own general rules and properties bump against molecular biology’s genetic determinism. Bateson follows Developmental Systems Theory, supporting its view that genes do not control that and neither DNA, nor the cell are sole contributors to complex differentiation, for both develop within a higher context. Recursions are probably the only way a truly complex (organic system) can be created—through an exponential geometry of information (K. S. Thompson)—while timing is of particular interest as it links developmental processes to evolution and also to ecosystem development. In the recycling process, biota respond not only to the immediate presence of mineral nutrients, but also to the context of their timing and frequency of particular entries into the recycling process and by developing sensitivity to frequency of return time ‘stacks’ the order of events in an ecological system (Allen and Hoekstra). The heterarchical stacking is best depicted in bagel-like toruses (D. H. McNeil).

This introductory chapter considers the development of philosophy in the twentieth century. It explains why an engagement with neo-Lamarckism forces us to consider the causal link between multiple levels of organization and analysis. It also argues that interactions between principles of causality operate in different ways between levels of selection.

This chapter presents an outline of the history of Lamarckian problematics. It provides a historical narrative of Lamarckism and Darwinism, discussing the ways in which the two are related. The formulation of the theory of use inheritance in the late eighteenth century is briefly discussed. The historical narratives span from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the period after World War II, tracing actual relationships among practitioners and conceptual connections among theories.

This chapter analyzes the golden age of Lamarckism in the period from 1866 until 1926. It focuses on Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and his generation, the generation after them, and the rival evolutionists who continued to refute or reconceive Lamarckism. Some of the nineteenth-century Lamarckians include Theodor Eimer, Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897), Alpheus Hyatt (1838–1902), and Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935).

This chapter argues that the history of French neo-Lamarckism can be analyzed and structured through two principal notions: plasticity and heredity. It examines the contradictory relationship between these two notions in order to understand the results of experimental transformism during the 1920s and the 1930s.

This book examines theater's engagement with evolution from the nineteenth century to the mid-twentienth century. Focusing primarily on British and American drama, it shows how theater provides a particularly potent and fascinating example of scientific ideas making their way into culture because of its combination of liveness and immediacy, kinetic human bodies in action, and time working on two levels (“real” and “theatrical” time) and because of its sheer variety, from mainstream drama to comedies to street theater and the public lecture; from the expansive epic theater of George Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder to the spare minimalism of Samuel Beckett. The stage particularly embraced varieties of non-Darwinian evolution, from Lamarckism to Ernst Haeckel's monism to saltation, often to test scientific ideas in broader cultural contexts and with “a cavalier attitude toward comprehension.” This book considers plays and performances that explore evolution in ways that map onto a specific theme or motif under debate, such as extinction or sexual selection.

This chapter presents three important reasons why evolutionary biologists dismissed Lamarckism or soft inheritance from the Modern Synthesis. The first is the legacy of adhering to August Weismann's ideas of the separation of germ line and soma. The second is the absence, from the 1920s through the 1940s, of convincing for strong evidence for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The third reason came from the assumptions of population and quantitative genetics, which were developing at the time.

This concluding chapter summarizes the main topics discussed in this book. It discusses some important points about Lamarckism and evolutionary biology today, the prevalence and evolutionary significance of genetic assimilation, selection for polyphenism, mutational assimilation, plasticity, niche construction, epigenetic inheritance, epigenetic variations, transgenerational transmission, and the nature of the change in evolutionary biology.

The cladocerans, currently thought to contain approximately 630 species, constitute the most speciose and anatomically diverse group within Branchiopoda. Unlike other branchiopods with gonopores located around the 12th thoracic somite, cladocerans are truly oligomerous, with greatly shortened bodies. Cladocerans sort themselves into two general types: swimmers and crawlers. The swimmers typically use the antennae for locomotion, assisted to a greater or lesser degree by the buoyancy of the body. The crawlers live on or in the bottom or on the surface of water plants. There are five subgroups: anomopods, ctenopods, haplopods, onychopods, and the extinct cryptopods. Determining phylogeny among cladocerans has been hindered by overreliance on morphology. Increasing use of molecular sequences is beginning to gain in significance, although problems with unresolved clades remain. The important achievement to date is a consensus regarding a clearly monophyletic Cladocera.

Chapter 5 explores literary texts which develop postgenomic perspectives. Margaret Drabble’s novel-memoir The Peppered Moth mobilizes neo-Lamarckian theories to challenge neo-Darwinian views of inheritance. In tracing the experience of social defeat and its impact across generations, it invokes a process close to transgenerational epigenetic inheritance, opening up questions about the biological transmission of social disadvantage. Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road also pushes against the limits of neo-Darwinian theory, demonstrating that nurture as well as nature can be somatically inscribed, anticipating research in epigenetics which demonstrates that experience can act as a cue for the modification of gene expression. It contrasts the love Kay receives in early life, which builds an enduring resilience, with the experience of racism associated with her brother’s adoption, which generates lasting insecurity. Catherine Malabou’s work on positive and negative plasticity illuminates these divergent trajectories.