Jessica Riskin at Aeon Magazine:
The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was 65 when his great treatise on the transformation of life was published. With Philosophie zoologique (1809), translated a century later as Zoological Philosophy, Lamarck intended to establish an entirely new science, one built on the idea that all living beings are constantly transforming themselves, from the tiniest microbes to the most complex mammals, gaining new forms and new abilities. It wasn’t the bodily structures of organisms that determined their ways of life, Lamarck said, but just the opposite: their ways of life in response to their circumstances gave rise to their changing bodily forms. ‘Can there be any consideration in natural history more important,’ he demanded, ‘or deserving of greater attention, than the one I have just set forth?’ (My translation.)
But if you’ve heard anything at all about Lamarck, it’s probably how wrong he was about one animal in particular, the giraffe, and how this giraffe fiasco epitomises his wrongness about everything.
more here.
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