Jessica Riskin on Lamarck, Agency in Biology, and the History of Evolution

Historian of science Jessica Riskin rehabilitates Jean-Baptiste Lamarck — not to unseat Darwin, but to recover the tradition Lamarck championed: that living things are intrinsically active, shaping themselves from within rather than being shaped only from without.

Key ideas

1. Two rival pictures of a living thing have contended since the 17th century. In the passive picture, an organism is a designed machine — built and driven by an outside force, first a designer God, later natural selection. In the active picture, it is self-making and self-transforming, redesigning itself over generations. Riskin’s earlier book The Restless Clock traces this struggle; Lamarck is the hero of the active tradition.

2. The caricature inverts the truth. Lamarck’s camp is remembered as mystical and ‘woo-woo’, but it was the reverse: these were the rigorous naturalists who refused any appeal to a supernatural God and tried to explain life from within. The mechanist, machine-model camp is the one that grew out of natural theology and the argument from design — which is why Riskin calls Richard Dawkins the ironic heir to William Paley.

3. Darwin was himself a Lamarckian. In every edition of On the Origin of Species Darwin kept the inheritance of acquired characteristics — his ‘inherited effects of use and disuse’. He half-adopted Paley’s passive model (with natural selection in God’s old seat) and half-adopted Lamarck’s active one, and was visibly torn between them. The modern portrait of the two men as opposites is a later invention.

4. ‘Lamarckism’ was made a term of abuse for extra-scientific reasons. August Weismann’s mouse-tail amputations — which neither Lamarck nor Darwin would have predicted to be inherited — became a famous but bogus refutation. Behind the eradication lay politics: the French-Revolutionary odour of radicalism and atheism, and, in the 20th century, a eugenic logic of control bound into the passive-organism model.

5. Modern biology quietly revisits Lamarck. Epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, and behaviour that leads natural selection (the Grants’ Galápagos finches; Martha Muñoz’s lizards) all restore some creative agency to organisms. In the narrow, careful sense that animal behaviour shapes the course of evolution, Riskin argues, ‘Lamarck was right’ — without Darwin being wrong.

Summary

The restless clock: two models of a living being

Carroll frames the episode with a pattern from his own field — great complexity is simplified into an austere theory, then complicated again — and maps it onto evolution: the modern synthesis fused genetics with Darwinian natural selection into a powerful, spare picture, which epigenetics, the microbiome and cultural inheritance are now re-complicating. Riskin’s The Restless Clock set up the deeper contest behind this. Two models of a living being have fought since the 1600s. In one, the organism is a designed machine, passive, the object of outside forces — a designer God for the 17th-century natural theologians, natural selection for the neo-Darwinists. In the other, ‘active mechanism’, the organism is self-making, constantly transforming and redesigning itself rather than merely being acted upon. Lamarck, Riskin realised only as that book closed, should have been its hero — so she gave him his own.

The caricature inverted — who was really the mystic

The received image of Lamarck is mystical and unscientific; Riskin says nothing could be further from the truth. The machine model was the theological one: it descends from the argument from design — John Ray, Robert Boyle, culminating in Paley’s watch on the heath — where the very passivity of the watch implies an external watchmaker. Lamarck’s tradition, running back through the mid-18th-century French materialists La Mettrie and Diderot, wanted no supernatural appeal at all, and so had to imagine how living machines could have made themselves, gradually, in deep time. Paley put God where the design came from; Darwin, Riskin argues, put natural selection in the same slot, inheriting the supernaturalism built into the passive model. Her shorthand: Dawkins is the ironic heir to Paley.

Darwin’s suppressed Lamarckism

The opposition of Darwin and Lamarck is, Riskin insists, later mythology. Darwin never questioned the inheritance of acquired characteristics — the idea that an organism changes itself through its behaviour in tiny increments that accumulate over thousands of generations into a giraffe’s neck or a bird’s webbed foot. He called it the inherited effects of use and disuse, and it appears in every edition of the Origin, in The Descent of Man, in everything he wrote. It even feeds his theory of sexual selection, where animals shape one another by their own standards of beauty. Darwin was torn between Paley’s passive machine and Lamarck’s active organism, and struggled with the tension all his life.

How ‘Lamarckism’ became a term of abuse

The banishment was driven from outside science as much as within. Weismann, a German Darwinist, chopped the tails off mice for generations and showed the offspring’s tails stayed normal — knowing full well this refuted neither Lamarck nor Darwin, since neither had claimed amputations were inherited, but wielding it as a gimmick that survives in textbooks still. Darwin himself feared Lamarckism’s association with revolution, regicide and atheism — his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, a radical and a poet, had held kindred ideas. By the turn of the 20th century the neo-Darwinists had expelled acquired inheritance and hardened the organism into pure passivity. Riskin presses further: the mid-century architects of the modern synthesis — Fisher, Haldane, Julian Huxley — were near-uniformly eugenicists, and she reads a logic of control, even a slide from evolutionary to behavioural passivity (‘animals are just the vehicles of their genes’), into the appeal of the reductive paradigm. Lysenko, who claimed Lamarck’s mantle in Stalin’s Soviet Union and helped send the geneticist Vavilov to die in prison, was ideological too — his coerced vernalisation of wheat was, like Weismann’s mice, an exertion from outside, not the self doing the work.

What modern biology does and doesn’t vindicate

Lamarck’s own theory rested on two forces: an intrinsic pouvoir de la vie, a material ‘power of life’ — akin to the physics of his day — that drives matter to complexify from spontaneously generated single cells outward; and the inheritance of acquired characteristics, as birds and mammals form habits by acts of will that leave heritable traces. He coined ‘invertebrate’, named over 6,000 species, catalogued the clouds, and even held that living things create the inanimate world around them (the white cliffs of Dover, the oxygenated atmosphere). Riskin closes her book with the deliberately polemical line that Lamarck was right — carefully bounded to mean that behaviour shapes evolution’s course. The evidence she marshals is modern: epigenetic inheritance (including a preliminary giraffe-and-okapi study she helped instigate in Namibia); the extended evolutionary synthesis of Mark Feldman and Kevin Laland; niche construction; the Grants’ finches, whose behavioural isolation preceded genetic isolation; and Muñoz’s ‘behaviourally nimble’ lizards that hide in crevices rather than evolving cold tolerance — behaviour leading natural selection. Her wider lessons: interpretation goes all the way down, so transparency about one’s assumptions beats a false view from nowhere; and we should see ourselves as agents acting from within nature, not managers imposing order from outside it.

Speakers

• Jessica Riskin — historian of science; Professor of History, Stanford; author of The Restless Clock and The Power of Life (on Lamarck).
• Sean Carroll — host; theoretical physicist and author, Mindscape.

See also

• Sean Carroll — host
• Andrea Wulf on the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Invention of the Self — a fellow Mindscape guest, on the Romantic and natural-philosophical currents (Erasmus Darwin among them) that shadowed Lamarck
• Evolution — the theory whose standard history this episode complicates
• Enlightenment — the 18th-century French materialism (La Mettrie, Diderot) from which Lamarck’s active-mechanist tradition grew
• Jeff Coller on mRNA, RNA Therapeutics, and the Future of Bespoke Medicine — modern biology of gene expression beyond the raw DNA sequence, the terrain Lamarckian epigenetics now occupies