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

Jessica Riskin

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

Jessica Riskin

Yes, and in fact the Lamarck book comes directly out of that earlier one. The Restless Clock was about a struggle I see as having taken place in the history of biology between two competing models of a living being. According to one model, a living being is a kind of designed machine — designed in a certain way and functioning in that way, the object of outside forces. In the first instance, in the 17th century, those outside forces were a designer God; in the modern neo-Darwinist version, the outside forces are natural selection. But in either case the organism is a machine that is fairly passive. The competing tradition is one I think of as active mechanism, in which the organism is itself self-making and self-transforming, constantly redesigning itself rather than being acted upon from outside. The Restless Clock traces the struggle between those two models from the 17th century up through the 20th.

Jessica Riskin

When I got to the end of writing that book, I realised that Lamarck should have been huge in it, because he really is the hero of the active mechanist tradition — the champion of the creative agency of living organisms. He's in there a little, but I was in the final stages, and I thought, this book should have been about Lamarck. I couldn't start over. So I thought, well, I'll give him his own book.

Jessica Riskin

That's right. One of the discoveries of working on The Restless Clock is that there were automatic machines — automata, hydraulic organs, clocks — all around the early modern European world, in churches and on wealthy estates. Part of the fun of writing the book was to go and visit some of these machines. I went to Salzburg and saw these extraordinary automata: gargoyles that would stick out their tongues, a chair you would sit in and it would grab you. I went there with my son, who was a little boy at the time, and he was completely enthralled. These machines have been entertaining small children for centuries. And people in the 17th century started trying to think in these terms. Descartes lived for a time near the French royal palace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where there were hydraulic grottoes, and he describes them in his writing. Descartes is the great theorist of living bodies as machinery. People were trying to think about what a living being — an animal or a human — could be.

Jessica Riskin

Mechanical clocks had been around for some centuries before — they date back to the high Middle Ages, the 13th or 14th century. Another important development was the camshaft: a barrel with pegs sticking out, like you see in a music box, that trigger a sequence of motions. You see quite elaborate automata governed by camshafts at the turn of the 16th and 17th century. There's a beautiful design by a French engineer named Isaac de Caus: a host of little birds fluttering and twittering, and an owl that pivots towards them. The whole thing is run by a water wheel; as the camshaft turns, the birds twitter and the owl turns towards them, and when it faces them the mechanism brakes so they freeze, and as it turns away they start again. Those are the programming devices of the early modern period. And there's a direct line from them to automatic looms in the mid-18th century — the cams triggered the raising and lowering of the warp threads — and to punch cards. The first punch cards were in automatic looms. And then Charles Babbage, the early 19th-century English mathematician and inventor, designed his mechanical calculating engines, the analytical engine and the difference engine, on the model of the automatic looms. So there's a continuous line from early modern camshafts through automatic looms through punch cards through modern computing.

Jessica Riskin

Absolutely. I'll go back to Descartes, the major theorist of the idea that you could understand living beings the way you understand clockwork. He tells stories of visiting these hydraulic grottoes, where you step in and a figure of Diana or some goddess flees. The fact that the automata seemed to respond to one another and to visitors — he really emphasises that they seem to be engaging and responding. It's not that he thought animals or people genuinely were clockwork, but that you could try to understand animal and human machinery in comparable terms, in terms of material parts. And the fact that he saw these machines all around certainly encouraged that.

Jessica Riskin

I can start with the older tradition. According to an Aristotelian picture, Aristotle described three kinds of soul. Plants have a vegetative soul that causes them to grow. Animals have a vegetative soul and a sensitive soul, so they grow and sense. People have a vegetative, a sensitive, and a rational soul, so they grow, sense, and reason. Descartes got rid of two of the three souls. He said there's really no such thing as an animal's vegetative or sensitive soul; the only soul he retained was the rational soul in human beings. Then in the 18th century much more thoroughgoing materialists — not dualists like Descartes, but people like La Mettrie or Diderot — got rid of the rational soul too. They said, everything should be describable in terms of moving parts. But there are different possibilities for these moving parts. Have they been put together by some outside force, so they just tick, tick, tick, the way a clockmaker makes a clock? Or are they themselves changing, transforming, recreating themselves? Did they come to be in this extraordinary organisation all at once, by someone arranging them, or did they arrange themselves? That's the big struggle.

Jessica Riskin

In this period you have the argument from design. The first people to make it — John Ray, the English theologian, Robert Boyle, the English chemist and theologian — said in the 17th century that you can demonstrate the existence of a designer God, a rational, omnipotent being, from the evidence of mechanical design in nature. They got very interested in minute considerations of mechanisms, like the mechanism of the eye. That tradition culminated with William Paley at the beginning of the 19th century, who famously said that if you're crossing a heath and your foot hits a rock, you might think it had always been there; but if your foot hits a watch, you know there has to be a watchmaker. What's interesting is that it assumes passivity on the part of the watch — it's just lying there like a rock to be kicked aside. What if it yelped and scuttled away? That would be a very different matter. Then you might think the watch got there on its own volition. That's the competing model that culminates with Lamarck: the idea that these living mechanisms could have come to be gradually, over many generations, in a self-made way — not by an order from outside.

Jessica Riskin

Exactly, that's exactly my point. Lamarck and the others in his tradition get a reputation for being woo-woo, mystical, and nothing could be farther from the truth. It's the exact opposite. These are the people who didn't want to make any appeal to a supernatural God, so they were trying to imagine how it could happen from within. And it was the mechanist, engineer-model people who advocated the engineering model of living machinery — that tradition emerged from the argument from design; it came out of a theology. So the shorthand I use is that Richard Dawkins, ironically, is the heir to William Paley. He doesn't see it that way, but I think that's really the case.

Jessica Riskin

Exactly. It's interesting that Charles Darwin, later in life, reminisced about being a student at Cambridge, where he memorised Paley — he said he could basically recite Paley from memory. You can hear it in his prose; he's a beautiful stylist of the English language, and it echoes Paley a little. He was, in effect, taking Paley and replacing God with natural selection. Darwin didn't put it that way — he was always careful to tell people they don't have to choose between God and Darwin, that the two are compatible — but his idea was that he could put natural selection in the spot where Paley had God. The problem is that this model of what a living thing is has a kind of supernaturalism built in: if the organism is totally passive, that suggests agency is somewhere else, outsourced to an external God.

Jessica Riskin

But another thing I want to emphasise is that Darwin didn't fully adopt that model. He partly adopted Paley's model, with natural selection playing the role of God, but he also adopted Lamarck's model, and that cannot be emphasised enough. Everybody nowadays represents them as opposites, but Darwin was a Lamarckian in a very important sense. He adopted what we now call the inheritance of acquired characteristics — the idea that a living being changes itself through its behaviours in tiny, infinitesimal ways, those are inherited by its offspring, and you add them together over thousands of generations, and you get the giraffe's long neck. Darwin never questioned that. He called it the inherited effects of use and disuse, and it's in every edition of the Origin of Species, in The Descent of Man, in everything he ever wrote. I see him as torn between the Paley passive model and the Lamarck active model, struggling with that problem.

Jessica Riskin

That's right. The Restless Clock is about that struggle between active and passive mechanism. It seems to me that the neo-Darwinist tradition — not Darwin himself, but the neo-Darwinist tradition — are the heirs to Paley; they carry on that passive model. And Lamarck's active mechanist model has been largely banished from mainstream science for over a hundred years. There are interesting reasons for that; there's a politics to it. In the first instance, in the later 19th century, it had to do with leaving room for an omnipotent God behind the scenes. Darwin was acutely conscious that Lamarckism had this ill odour of radicalism, revolution, regicide, atheism, because Lamarck had developed his theories during the French Revolution. And Charles Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, a doctor and naturalist, had come up with similar ideas of the transformation of living forms from generation to generation, though he hadn't developed it into a systematic theory. Erasmus Darwin was a poet, a romantic, a political radical who admired the French revolutionaries. So Charles Darwin was a little embarrassed, a little worried about the radical, dangerous aura of these ideas.

Jessica Riskin

As you move through the 19th century, Darwin's followers have the idea that for evolutionary theory to persuade people and be successful, they have to make it seem sober and not dangerous. So they eradicated all traces of Lamarckian inheritance — what Darwin called the inherited effects of use and disuse. His followers got rid of that very adamantly, especially a German Darwinist named August Weismann. He carried out these experiments that have become very famous, with mice. Do you know Weismann's mouse experiment?

Jessica Riskin

He chopped the tails off mice, and he did this for several generations, and he showed that the offspring had perfectly normal tails. He himself knew this was really not a refutation of Lamarck or Darwin, because neither of them had said amputations were inherited. Both believed that organisms transformed themselves from within, by their habits and behaviours — not that an amputation would be inherited. That's a very different thing. Weismann knew that perfectly well, and even said so, but he said this will refute the popular version of belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. It was a gimmick, but extraordinarily powerful, and people still have it in biology textbooks as a refutation of Lamarckian inheritance. So from the turn of the 20th century you see a neo-Darwinist theory emerge in which Lamarckian inheritance is absolutely banished, and there's a lot of insistence on the utter passivity of the organism. People actually slide from evolutionary passivity to behavioural passivity — and by the mid-20th century the idea is that animals are just the vehicles of their genes.

Jessica Riskin

He was born in 1744 in Picardy in northern France, the 11th and youngest child and fourth son of a family of the military nobility, but their funds were already dwindling, and by the time they got to Lamarck they'd spent all their money on his older brothers' military careers. So at age 11 he was sent off to study for the priesthood, which he hated. When his father died a few years later, he said, that's it, I won't be a priest, and went galloping off on one of his mother's old horses to join a regiment fighting in the Seven Years' War in Central Europe. He was a soldier for a while, then had to leave the military. Georges Cuvier, Lamarck's arch-enemy, had the job of writing his eulogy — the worst, nastiest eulogy you've ever seen — and nastily insinuated that Lamarck had been lifted by the head by one of his fellow soldiers horsing around, giving him some kind of neck injury, so he left the military. Meanwhile his regiment had been garrisoned in Provence, he'd fallen in love with wildflowers, and he decided he wanted to be a botanist.

Jessica Riskin

Off he went to Paris. He was studying botany, living in a garret apartment right up under the roof, poor student, and all he could see were clouds — so he started studying clouds too and became the first person to categorise and name them. He was a very tidy sort of guy; he liked to taxonomise. He ended up naming over 6,000 species of invertebrates and other living things, but he also taxonomised the clouds and named them, developed a science of meteorology, and set up the first government weather bureau. He caught the interest of Georges Buffon, an extraordinarily prolific and well-connected naturalist, director of the Royal Botanical Garden, who made Lamarck his protégé. That was excellent for a while, but then in 1788 Buffon died, 1789 was the revolution, and everything was thrown into turmoil. Lamarck helped shepherd the garden through the revolution and to build a new Museum of Natural History. But when it came time to give professorships, he wasn't allowed a botany professorship, because the botanists already in place didn't want him. So he had to take the lowliest of the zoology professorships — the professorship of insects and worms. I initially wanted to call my book The Professor of Insects and Worms, but my editor didn't like that title.

Jessica Riskin

He renamed it, actually. It was Linnaeus's ginormous category of all insects and worms, which included molluscs — molluscs were worms, according to that — and it was Lamarck who coined the term invertebrates. That was his coinage.

Jessica Riskin

At the moment he became Professor of Insects and Worms, he was embroiled in the midst of the French Revolution. He survived that, and then Napoleon came in and made himself emperor. And Napoleon hated Lamarck. He loathed Lamarck and Lamarck's science. He was the one who shut down Lamarck's weather bureau and tried to undermine him at every turn. There's a story told by the astronomer François Arago — this is in your line — who was a young man at the time. In 1809, when Lamarck published his magnum opus, the Philosophie Zoologique, where he presents his theory of evolution to the world for the first time, he and Arago were among the members of the National Institute waiting nervously in a salon of the Tuileries Palace to present their work to Napoleon. Napoleon came sweeping in, marched up to Arago, and said, you're very young, what's your name? Then he turned to Lamarck and said, what is that you're holding? He snatched Lamarck's book, thrust it into the hands of an aide, and said, basically, your work is all nonsense. Poor Lamarck was reduced to tears of humiliation.

Jessica Riskin

He was very interested in science. It wouldn't have been their first exchange. Napoleon had a close inner circle of scientists — Georges Cuvier the paleontologist, Laplace the astronomer and mathematician, Fourcroy the chemist — and all of them hated Lamarck. Cuvier was a devout Lutheran who absolutely rejected transformism, evolution. Napoleon didn't like Lamarck's participatory meteorological programme — Napoleon was into top-down, not participatory. And I think it also had to do with the substance of Lamarck's theory, which was all about distributing creative agency and transformational power throughout the living world. Napoleon wasn't interested in that. He wanted to control nature, control the living world. It was not a congenial theory. It also sounded atheistic, which was bad PR when Napoleon was trying to court the monarchists. It was overdetermined, but certainly Napoleon was not a fan.

Jessica Riskin

It's a really good question. In my course on the scientific revolution, I talk about Galileo and Copernicanism. People assume Copernicanism was in trouble with the church from the beginning, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Copernicus was a church canon doing church business — he was working on calendar reform, because the church was very worried about calculating the dates of feast days like Easter, which is the first full moon after the first Sunday after the vernal equinox, so you have to correlate solar and lunar calendars. The Catholic Church was like the NSF of early modern Europe; it funded astronomy. It was not necessarily going to condemn Copernicanism, and it happened in a complicated way with Galileo. In Lamarck's case, in the middle of the 18th century in France there was a moment of rigorous naturalism, materialism, anticlericalism — but then a reactionary moment in the 19th century, under Napoleon and after. It's not a uniform progress toward greater secularism over time. And the conflict between Darwinian evolution and the church really came to a head not in 19th-century England but in America in the 1920s. There's a delay and a removal of that conflict to America.

Jessica Riskin

Certainly not today. Napoleon had the sense that modern scientific authority and modern political authority went right together. He went off to Egypt with his whole scientific retinue. That modern partnership between science and government really began to take shape at the end of the 17th century, with institutions like the Royal Society of London and the French Academy of Sciences. And right now, in the United States, for the first time when I teach this material, I have to say to students that that partnership seems possibly at an end, or under threat, in a way I absolutely didn't foresee.

Jessica Riskin

The book is called The Power of Life, and that phrase is his — le pouvoir de la vie, the power of life. He uses it to name a force he thought was intrinsic to living matter that caused it to complexify. It was equivalent to the forces of contemporary physics, which were full of tendencies: electricity follows a conductor, gravity causes common matter to tend downward toward the centre of the Earth, magnetised objects attract or repel. The power of life maybe sounds woo-woo, but what he meant was a very material force, like the forces in physics. He thought it all begins with spontaneous generation — forces like heat or electricity acting on inanimate matter, generating the very simplest forms of life, single-celled organisms. And from that moment the power of life takes over, causing it to complexify and ramify ever outward. As living forms get more complex, they respond to the environment — in rudimentary ways at first, then in more and more fitted ways, until you get to birds and mammals, which respond by acts of will, forming habits in response to their circumstances. Like the giraffe stretching its neck up to the leaves. Those acts of will, those habits, cause tiny changes that get added together, inherited over many generations, and you get dramatic structures over a great well of time.

Jessica Riskin

One more thing about this: Lamarck thought living organisms were not just creating and transforming themselves, but also creating the inanimate world around them. He said living things are the only creative forces in the world — he's taking away God's monopoly on creation and reassigning it to living beings. He said, I don't really know how the whole thing started, what came first, but I do know that the mineral structure of the world is formed by living beings and the things they make. The white cliffs of Dover are made of organisms; continents and coastlines are shaped by living beings.

Jessica Riskin

Absolutely. I tried to find out what current biologists think about this, and there's a lot of interest in the role of living beings in forming the surface mineralogy of the Earth. There was the great oxidation event with the first living organisms, which seeded the atmosphere with oxygen — and without that oxygen you wouldn't have the same minerals. In today's geology and earth sciences there's a great deal of interest in exactly that. And in exobiology, that's something people look for: the signature that reflects the presence of living beings. So that's one sense in which Lamarck is continuous with current science. But also, some of his ideas are really coming back into mainstream biology after being banished all that time. There's this movement, the extended evolutionary synthesis — my colleague Marcus Feldman at Stanford is a member, and Kevin Laland at the University of St Andrews. They're interested in incorporating developmental, ecological, behavioural, and even cultural elements back into the evolutionary picture, in response to the modern synthesis that Julian Huxley declared in 1942, the marriage of genetics and neo-Darwinism, which has been a very reductive idea: purely random genetic variation, natural selection. The extended evolutionary synthesis people are trying to reopen the field of explanation beyond that.

Jessica Riskin

Right, and not just Lamarck — Darwin too was interested in those ideas, the blacksmith's arm. Those are in keeping with the canonical examples Lamarck offers: the water birds who stretch their toes to paddle in the water and end up, each time, very slightly more webbing between their toes. He has a wonderful passage about shore birds who don't like the water, don't want to be in it, but want to wade out to get food, so they stretch their legs and crane their necks — that's how you get the very long, skinny legs. Whereas ducks and swans like the water, so they don't stretch their legs, but they get long necks. So it has to do with their likes and dislikes. And this is something Darwin picked up in his theory of sexual selection — animals, by choosing mates according to their own standards of beauty, shape one another from generation to generation. Darwin talks about animals exerting their aesthetic senses. That's very much in keeping with Lamarck.

Jessica Riskin

Oh, that is beautiful, I will read that. Robert Hazen is among the people I was thinking of when I talked about current geology. There are certainly elements in Lamarck that are still there or being rediscovered now. Not to oversimplify, but the oversimplified version is: it was the inheritance of acquired characteristics aspect of Lamarck's thought that some people decided was the opposite of what Darwin said, and therefore we should banish it. But nowadays we're rediscovering senses in which maybe something like that is real.

Jessica Riskin

There are a few different ways. The last line of the book, which is very polemical, is: Lamarck was right. What do I mean by someone who died in 1829 being right about evolution? He didn't know anything about genetics. So I want to be careful. I mean that animal behaviour plays a role in shaping the course of evolution — and I don't mean Darwin was wrong; Darwin was a Lamarckian. A few different ways behaviour can shape the course of evolution, or acquired characteristics can be inherited. One that everybody thinks of now is epigenetic changes. Epigenetic inheritance refers to structures outside the DNA, around the DNA, that affect gene expression and can therefore influence the course of evolution. That's a big area of research now, with examples in every form of life. And this is one of the fun aspects of my adventure with this book: I managed to persuade some very nice biologists to do a research experiment on epigenetic inheritance in giraffes. I've never been involved in a science experiment, being a historian, but I really wondered whether anybody had ever studied epigenetic inheritance in giraffes — giraffes are the emblematic Lamarck animal. I couldn't find anything.

Jessica Riskin

So we've done this experiment, working with the Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia. They sent us cheek swabs — when I told my daughter, she thought that was the most hilarious thing, imagining a very long Q-tip — from two different species of giraffes, and okapi, which is the closest relative to giraffes, with a much shorter neck. My collaborator biologists have found that there are epigenetic differences between the two species of giraffes and between giraffes and okapi. It's very preliminary, still under review, not yet published — you'd have to do a lot more work to find out what those differences mean — but it's been very cool to be part of that research. That's one example. Another is behaviour. Peter and Rosemary Grant, evolutionary biologists at Princeton, a married couple, studied Darwin's finches in the Galápagos and showed speciation happening in real time over 40 years. What they showed was that behavioural isolation of populations preceded reproductive, genetic isolation — the populations stopped mating long before they became infertile. That's behaviour leading natural selection.

Jessica Riskin

Another example: Martha Muñoz at Yale, an extraordinary researcher, has studied lizards in the Dominican Republic that have moved up from sea level to 3,000 metres, where it's cold. She's shown that by being, as she says, behaviourally nimble, instead of evolving cold tolerance, they heat themselves on the sun-baked rock and then scurry into crevices, and so they've evolved things that make it easy to hide in a crevice, like a flat head and short legs — again, behaviour leading natural selection. And one last thing, from Marcus Feldman, my colleague at Stanford: the field of niche construction, where the animal shapes the environmental niche that then exerts pressures upon it. It's a two-way street. So there are all kinds of ways in which, in my broader interpretation, Lamarck was right.

Jessica Riskin

Exactly. It's partly a love of simplicity, but I think there are other things going on. In the later 19th and early 20th century it had to do with making room for a traditional theological vision — if the organism is passive, that leaves room for a designer God behind the scenes. But I've also been struck by the degree to which the neo-Darwinists of the middle decades of the 20th century, from the inception of the modern synthesis, were eugenicists. Julian Huxley declared the modern synthesis in 1942. Going back even before that, R. A. Fisher, the geneticist and statistician who did foundational work in neo-Darwinist biology, and Haldane — I'm naming the people who established this paradigm — were all eugenicists, pretty much without exception. There was a eugenic logic built into the idea of the passivity of living beings, including human beings. It's a very heroic model of science. Julian Huxley said, we can become the general managers of evolution, and he coined the term transhumanism.

Jessica Riskin

It's funny, there's a contradiction: you have this passive model of what living things are, and yet the idea that they can seize hold of it and exert their own structure on it. I have a transcript of a conference in London in 1962 where all these major figures were present. Fisher was very worried that poor people have more children than rich people, assuming poor people are genetically inferior, and asking how to solve that problem — maybe offer a tax rebate to rich people for having more children. And Francis Crick said, well, it should be a simple matter for a government to put a sterilising agent into the food supply, and then people would have to apply for a licence to have children, and you could give them an antidote.

Jessica Riskin

People were joking about this. It was absolutely mainstream. James Watson got in trouble very late in his life for saying this kind of race stuff out loud in an ugly way, but what he was saying was not out of keeping with what was utterly mainstream in that science through all those decades, and in some ways even today. So the attraction to this reductive neo-Darwinist paradigm is not purely a love of simplicity — I think it's a love of power and control, connected with a kind of eugenics and with the idea of exerting control on the natural world. I'm hopeful that the story of Lamarck and Lamarckism can cast some historical perspective on the current state of evolutionary biology and suggest other ways of thinking about organisms that are less about control and domination. Already people are pursuing those.

Jessica Riskin

Lysenko — that's a really interesting episode, and it's the other thing people associate with Lamarck, besides giraffes. He claimed to be a Lamarckian in the 1940s in the Soviet Union. He claimed he could change the germination season of wheat by subjecting it to cold and moisture — which farmers did do — but he also claimed it would be inherited in the next generation, which it wasn't. And again, that's not really Lamarckism. That's more like Weismann chopping off the tails of mice: an exertion from outside.

Jessica Riskin

Exactly. Lysenko claimed he could do this, Stalin embraced it, and it became very difficult to do genetic research in the Soviet Union. One Soviet geneticist, Vavilov, was imprisoned and died in prison. It was a terrible episode. But what's interesting is that it was ideological from both sides. On the Western side, Julian Huxley seized hold of the example of Lysenko — this was the moment when he and other neo-Darwinists were busily eradicating Lamarckism from Darwinism. He explained that the Soviet communists couldn't accept genetics because they couldn't accept the genetic inequality of people; they were radical egalitarians. So he equated Lamarckism with Soviet communism, and in the West it became very difficult to do research on Lamarckian inheritance, for ideological reasons. To say it was ideological in the Soviet Union doesn't mean it wasn't ideological in the West.

Jessica Riskin

Huxley, as a eugenicist, also said we have to exploit the reality of genetic inequality, and that our slogan should be free but unequal. That's a perfect encapsulation of the Cold War ideology.

Jessica Riskin

Thank you for asking that; it's very close to my heart. Science is an element of human culture, not separable from the rest of culture. Interpretation goes all the way down: everything we know is known by us from our perspective, in a culture and a situation, and our interpretation is inseparable from our knowledge of the world. So rather than striving for a view-from-nowhere objectivity, which is impossible, or claiming to speak ex cathedra in the name of science or nature, the thing to aspire to is to be as self-conscious and transparent as possible about what our interpretations are and why. That's a different thing from objectivity, but it's still a question of rigour, still a search for truth — accepting that interpretation goes all the way down is not a taint; it's just what it is to be a human trying to understand the world.

Jessica Riskin

Another thing: up through the end of the 19th century the sciences were not separate from literature, art, aesthetics, other elements of culture. It was all philosophy, all mixed together. Darwin was a brilliant writer who thought about his science in literary and philosophical terms, and Lamarck was a philosopher and a musician, thinking in a holistic way. Then there was a moment of divorce — I'd say 25 years on either side of the turn of the 20th century — a radical divorce between science and all other forms of knowing. That's a story I want to tell in another book. On some level it is impoverishing on both sides. If we could move to a more integral way of approaching the world, in which science is not in splendid isolation but more connected with other areas, that would be much better. Teaching the history of science at a place like Stanford, I'm the soul of togetherness between both sides of campus. I've been excited to be part of conversations with the extended evolutionary synthesis people — they're interested in culture. They talk about whales having a culture, deciding what song to sing and how to hunt, and handing those practices down to their offspring. That more integral approach is maybe already happening, and it's very exciting.

Jessica Riskin

That's a wonderful question; let me see if I can do it justice. One thing is that it's important to think in participatory terms. We are acting from within the natural world, not from outside it and imposing upon it. There's a French environmental philosopher named Baptiste Morizo, at the University of Aix-Marseille, who argues that environmentalists — people very concerned about conservation and preservation — nevertheless continue to think in terms of exerting an order: eradicating invasive species, maintaining an ecology in the exact way they feel it should be maintained. That mindset is still participating in the older, destructive way of thinking. Instead we should regard ourselves differently. E. O. Wilson had this, I think, crazy half-earth idea, that humans should occupy only half the planet and leave the other half wild, as though humans could be extricated from the rest of the natural world. But we are animals — this is what Lamarck and Darwin have shown us. In the animal world, we are part of nature. So somehow we need to imagine our conservation efforts as being from within the natural world and not from without.

Jessica Riskin

Thank you so much. It's really been fun. It's been wonderful.