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The Evolutionary Thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Why His Original Ideas Should Be Taught in Classrooms

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Abstract

The name Lamarck is very well known in the teaching of biology, being associated with an early effort to explain evolution. Nevertheless, when evolution is taught in the classroom, the only Lamarckian ideas that stand out are related to the ‘inheritance of acquired characters’, invariably illustrated by the example of the lengthening of giraffes’ necks, as a way of contrasting Lamarckian ideas with Darwinian natural selection. Our aim here is to argue that there are other important ideas in Lamarck’s work that are directly related to the origin and transformation of species. These concepts, causal explanations of organic nature, can be taught to students who are learning about the sources and development of evolutionary thought and will moreover provide the student with properly justified reasons as to why Lamarck’s explanation is considered to be the first wide-ranging and well-argued explanation of biological evolution. The Lamarckian concepts that we consider important for teaching evolutionary thought are the following: (1) the species as an arbitrary concept, directly related to the Lamarckian concept of the continuous transformation of species, (2) the ancestor–descendant relationship, and organic diversification from a common plan of organisation to a branching series, (3) gradual change, related to changes in environmental conditions, and (4) the controversy concerning the origin of life (that is, having either a natural cause or a divine origin), life’s transformation, and the natural origin of human beings, including our moral capacity, subjects which were related to Lamarck’s other political and philosophical interests.

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Notes

  1. References and quotations were consulted in Philosophie zoologique, in the University of Granada’s digital library: Volume I: https://digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/7712 and Volume II: https://digibug.ugr.es/handle/10481/7711

  2. On the discussion of the translation of ‘besoin’ as desire instead of ‘need’, see for instance Cannon, 1957; Mayr 1972. In translations into other languages, for example Spanish, ‘besoin’ has been correctly translated from the French. See Lamarck, 2017.

  3. ‘C’est surtout dans les corps vivans, et principalement dans les animaux, qu’on a cru apercevoir un but aux opérations de la nature. Ce but cependant n’y est là, comme ailleurs, qu’une simple apparence et non une réalité’ (Lamarck, 1815, T. I., p. 324).

  4. ‘Adaptation’ was not a word used by Lamarck.

  5. It is important to note that for Lamarck ‘natural’ means ‘material’. That is, he explains natural phenomena in terms of material causes. On the varieties of naturalism in historical terms, see Harrison and Roberts, 2019, 1–6.

  6. This avoids continually repeating a story with the same authors, and it can be shown that scientific practice is much more complex in terms of its development, construction of knowledge, and the complex relationships established between different actors in the same scientific community.

  7. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, Lamarck’s ideas were widely known in academic settings in various countries, in parallel with the introduction, dissemination, and appropriation of Darwinism (Glick, 2010; Glick et al., 2001). With the emergence of the Modern synthesis, Lamarck’s ideas were reduced to an example of an incorrect scientific explanation and, while it was recognised by the authors of the synthesis that Lamarck’s contributions were broader than simply the notion of inheritance of acquired characters, his notions of inheritance and evolution were already outdated and were downgraded to a marginal status (Dobzhansky, 1942, 392), no more than a scientific anecdote. Dobzhansky’s position was more or less similar to that taken in various English-speaking countries, though not in others where Lamarck continued to figure centrally in biology textbooks, sharing credit with Darwin for ideas about the inheritance of acquired characters (Todes, 1989). In the former Soviet Union and other socialist countries, it was practically compulsory for a Marxist to adopt the ideas of the inheritance of acquired characters (Gaissinovitch, 1980, 6), in an environment that Zirkle (1959) and other authors referred to as ‘Marxist biology’. Under the influence of Russian biology, even at the height of the synthetic theory, the durability of the idea of inheritance of acquired characters as a valid scientific explanation was evident in textbooks that were prepared for biology teaching until almost the nineteen-sixties (Argueta Villamar et al., 2003).

  8. ‘Ainsi, cette Philosophie zoologique présent les résultats de mes études sur les animaux, leurs caractères généraux et particuliers, leur organisation, les causes de ses développemens et de sa diversité, et facultés qu´ils en obtiennent;’ (Lamarck, 1809a, 1809b, T. I, p. viii). [Thus, this Zoological Philosophy presents the results of my studies on animals, their general and particular characters, their organisation, the causes of their development and diversity, and the faculties they obtain from it;].

  9. Lyell attempted to refute this idea in the Principles of Geology (Lyell 1832). On Lyell’s evolutionism, see for example Coleman (1962) and Recker (1990).

  10. On Lamarck, irritability and sentience see Giglioni, 2013.

  11. Lamarck assumes that there is no spontaneous generation of organisms per se but of organised matter having present certain properties of life, such as irritability and reproduction, forms that would later give rise to organisms in the full sense of the word (Lamarck, 1802, pp. 36–37).

  12. See for example Coffin (1917) and Polowetzky (1993).

  13. On the issue of morality, the French philosopher Pierre Jean George Cabanis is a strong influence (1757–1808), in particular, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1802).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Biología Evolutiva, Facultad de Ciencias, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico

    Ricardo Noguera-Solano & Rosaura Ruiz-Gutiérrez

  2. Colegio de Historia, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico

    Juan Manuel Rodríguez-Caso

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  1. Ricardo Noguera-Solano
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Correspondence to Ricardo Noguera-Solano.

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Noguera-Solano, R., Rodríguez-Caso, J.M. & Ruiz-Gutiérrez, R. The Evolutionary Thought of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Sci & Educ 30, 909–929 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-021-00215-0

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