Subtitled: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
(This is linked to a post on my Substack, Change Everything)
p. 28 Lamarck lectured in the Garden of Plants for almost three decades, beginning at the height of the Revolution in 1795 and ending during the Second Restoration in 1819…His course register lists people from 27 countries including Brazil, Jamaica and Turkey. His students also came from every walk of life: artists, doctors, phamacists, chemists, geologists, botanists, zoologists, military officers, engineers, lawyers, merchants and writers including Balzac and Saint-Beuve. To this diverse crowd, Lamarck introduce a new science for which he coined a name: ‘biology'”
p. 49 “A casual bet with some friends led Lamarck to write French Flora. One day, strolling with some fellow botany students, he remarked that he could enable the first psserby, whoever it might be, to identify any plant in the garden. All he’d need would be to first expalin to the person the basic distinguishinjg features of plants… Soon afterwards, they gathered back in the garden, accosted the first passerby and hey presto!… Today the idea… may not seem extraordinary. But at the time, it was a radical and downright Rousseauian bet. It meant that botany was not the preserve of scholars writing in Latin. On the contrary botany was a walk in the park, a pastime for the people. The method Lamarck developed to win his bet … he called it ‘method of dissection; today it’s called a ‘dichotomous key”.
p. 86 “If, during the tumult of the Revolution, the only way to retain a job in the botanical garden and natural history museum is to take a position no one else wants, a ‘professorship in insects and worms,’ you will turn from a career in botany and, in middle age, remake yourself as a zoologist specialising in these lowly creatures, for whom you invent a new taxonomix category, ‘invertebrates’, on the basis of which you will force a momentous new theory of the history of life.
p. 99 Georges Cuvier “In keeping with his Protestant faith … was particularly unsympathetic to Lamarck’s central, revolutionary idea that animals transformed themselves by their own agency and that minute changes, inherited and accummulated over generations, could explain their fitness to their environments. All of natural history and zoology would fall apart, if living forms were fleeting. He understood the fossils of extint creatures to reflect not transformations but rather a series of catastrophes, each eliminating the animals of a given time and place; they were then replaced by brand-new, euqally fixed and unchanging beings through new acts of creation… his central anatomical law .. held that one could infer all parts of a creature from any single part since they all followed one another by rational necessity… because a divine designer had created them according to an optimal plan.
p. 124 Lamark’s theory “also starkly oposed the National Institute members’ favourite theory of the composition of matter, which was the theory of Antoine Lavoiser, a chemist, tax collector and philosophical revisionist who, along with the other members of the company of tax collectors, had lost his head to the guillotine in the spring of 1794… Lavoisier and his fellows claimed that the elements came together and apart simply as a result of temperature and atmospheric pressure. In their ‘new chemistry’, which they also referred to as the ‘pneumatic chemistry’ because of the central role it assigned to airs annd their combination, living organisms had no particular role to play.”
p. 136 Lamarck was a friend of Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire. “He was frustrated by his contemporaries’ commitment to what he called ‘ready-made ideas of psychology’ that ruled out the possibility of animals having intelligence and moral sentiments. … their ‘proud pretensions’ led them to place a ‘barrier’ between themselves and other living beings. The ancients by contrast, both Greek and Egyptian, had been keenly attentive to the nuances of animal behaviour. They had placed all animals including humans on a continum, assuming that intelligence varied with ‘organic structures’ and had therefore carefully scrutinized the actions of animals in relation to human behaviours, a practice Geoffrey hoped to emulate and bring back into currency.”
p. 168-70 “Isaac Newton, whose science provided Laplace with his starting point, came right out and said it in 1713 in the second edition of his Principia.. ‘the true God… is Supreme or most Perfect. He is Eternal, and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient.’…. The deterministic mechanism of the world, in Laplace’s science, was a manifestation of omnipotence: a total consolidation of power, with no room for even minor exertions of choice or will, and no such thing as contingency or uncertainty. .. How different a world – how opposite a world – from Lamarck’s churning commotion of life forces in continual self-transformation.”
p. 172 Lamarck had taken a major role in encouraging citizen science about meterology, but Napoleon himself ordered him to stop. Lamarck later recalled he wasn’t ‘writing at all about politics’ and devoted hismelf exclusively to ‘studies of nature’. It does seem extraordinary that Napoleon, the great moderniser, the mastermind of rational, scientific approaches to governmental administration and authority, should have taken such a hatred to metereology… But … meteorology resists a reductive, deterministic model of science. And the weather defies control… anyway… Lamarck was quite mistaken to suggest that ‘studies of nature’ are separate from ‘politics’. Lamarck’s natural science was overtly materialistic, granted creative agency to the humblest of living beings, combined poetry with observation and measurement, insisted upon the embroilment of the observer – sensory, physical emotion – in the world observed, and promulgated a participatory model of scientific and governmental authority. To Napoleon and his scientific advisers, that was all plainly subversive.”
p. 237 Lamarck writing on humans “The thing we know about humans … is that they are natural beings, like other animals. They have intelligence, instincts and sentiments. They’re driven by certain ‘inclinations’: the tendency to seek wellbeing and avoid suffering, a feeling of self-love, a drive to dominate, and a repugnance at the idea of their own demise. These inclinations are universal. They’re the same in human beings ‘of all countries and all times’, whether in ‘civilization’ or in nature. The entry is pretty banal in itself,… until you consider its juxutaposition” with many contemporary hideously racist musings, from Cuvier, Buffon, Linnaeus and many more.
p. 258 “Imagination, he writes in the Zoological Philosophy, is crucial to literature and poetry, and it is also essential – in close partnership with reason – in science. Without imagination… there is no genius and without genius there can be no chance of making discoveries other than isolated and inconsequential facts. In some private notes, Lamarck unleashed his frustration about his contemporaries’ methodological strictures, condemning any large view of nature, as though one could understand the gepgrahpy of the earth’s surface by contemplating each spot on the ground with a magnifying glass.”
p. 304 August Weismann (a man for whom the term reductionist might have been invented) chopped the tails off successive generations of mice, and therefore claimed he had disproved Lamarck. He said the Frenchman “assumes the transmission of acquired characters’. Lamarch had supposed that bodily changes were inherited and Darwin, regrettably, had followed him… Lamarch might have objected, if he could have, that his theory didn’t assume the transmission of all acquired characters,, only those acquired through responsive behaviours, habits and ways of life.”
p. 307-9 “Our hapless, tailless little mice were participating not only in the defeat of Lamarchism but in the founding moments of scientific research as practiced in modern universities… emerged in Germany during the mid- to late-19th century as the universities there developed from medieval theological seminaries to juggernauts of scientific and industrial research and key organs of the state… beginning in 1876 with the founding of John Hopkins on the template of the University of Berlin, the United States began to import the model… the science and theological faculties established a mode of harmonious coexistence. They stayed out of each other’s way by sticking to their own domains. The scientists confined themselves to describing material mechanisms, leaving all questions of agency and meaning to the theologians. In this arrangement, biologists represented livig beings as assemblages of moving parts, assuming that the source of their forms and structures law not within themselves but with a divine engineer beyond the machinery of nature. Weismann helped constitute this model of living beings as the passive result of outside forces acting on them, never through their own beahviours, and that no change taking place in the body of an individual organism could ever inscribe itself in the reproductive cells. This principle, which came to be known to biologists as the ‘Weismann barrier’, separating body cells from reproductive cells, implied that no living being could possibly transform itself in any way that could be inherited… eagerly took up Spencer’s phrase ‘inheritance of acquitted characters’ and ran with it.. made it his mission to eradicate every trace of this Lamarckian idea from Darwinian evolution… Darwin himself .. had seen ‘use and disuse’ as an essential feature of his theory.”
p. 363 ” In Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (1949) Huxley wrote that Lamarckism was congenial to Stalin and the Soviet dogmatic egalitarians because they refused to accept the ugly but unavoidable implication of a strictly genetic theory of inheritance: that people are genetically unequal as a result of the random shuffling of genes… Although Lamarck never explicity addressed the question of human equality, his materialism and overt irreligion, which had led people to connect his theory with the radical egalitarian extreme of the French Revolution during the ealry 19th century, now helped them to associate it with Communism in the mid-20th. Maybe this wasn’t actually such a stretch… the Lamarckian view that living beings aren’t reducible to their physical parts but are defined by their creative activity in the world, and his corollary for humans, the important influence of the ‘moral’ on the ‘physical’ – these ideas undermine the motion of any fixed, unitary measure of fitness or worth.”
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