Speaker

Jessica Riskin

Jessica Riskin

Historian of science and Professor of History at Stanford University, known for recovering a long-buried tradition in biology: the idea that living things are intrinsically active, making and remaking themselves from within.

Riskin works on the history of science from the Enlightenment onward, with a particular eye for how the machines and metaphors of an age shape its picture of life. Her book The Restless Clock traces a centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick — a contest between two models of a living being: the passive, designed machine driven by outside forces (a designer God, later natural selection), and the ‘active mechanism’ that transforms itself from within. That book’s unfinished business became The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a scientific biography that rehabilitates Lamarck — the champion of living things’ creative agency — against a century of caricature.

Core positions

  • The received story of Lamarck is inside-out. Lamarck’s tradition is remembered as mystical, but it was the rigorous, naturalising camp that refused any supernatural appeal; the machine-model camp descends from natural theology and the argument from design. Riskin calls Richard Dawkins the ironic heir to William Paley.
  • Darwin was partly a Lamarckian. He kept the inheritance of acquired characteristics — the ‘inherited effects of use and disuse’ — in every edition of the Origin, and was torn between the passive machine and the active organism.
  • Lamarckism was banished for reasons beyond evidence — French-Revolutionary radicalism, and a 20th-century eugenic logic of control woven into the passive-organism model.
  • Modern biology is quietly Lamarckian in the careful sense that behaviour shapes evolution’s course: epigenetic inheritance, niche construction, and behaviour that leads natural selection.
  • Interpretation goes all the way down. Rather than claiming a view from nowhere, science should be as transparent as possible about its own assumptions — and see human beings as agents acting within nature, not managing it from outside.

In the wiki