Charles Darwin's bicentennial is coming up, and biologists all over the Web are getting ready for an orgy of Darwinania. We'll be participating, too. But amid all the love for the father of evolution by natural selection, let's spare some attention for his distinguished predecessor, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
Lamarck is the original hard-luck story of biology. He was born a French aristocrat, which meant he got to go off and get shot at in the service of the King, eventually suffering a permanent disability. Then France had a revolution and he wasn't an aristocrat anymore, just a scientist with a meager pension. He spent the next several decades struggling to make ends meet and still find time to write down his theories about the evolution of organisms. And since his death he's mostly been used as a strawman opponent for Charles Darwin in triumphalist accounts of the history of biology.
That's too bad, because M. Lamarck was a truly important thinker in the evolution (heh) of biological thought. He was an advocate of the idea that cells are the basic building blocks of living things, he was a genuine pioneer in the concept of environmental influences on living things, and he was an expert on the classification of invertebrates. He deserves better than to be known in his own right, rather than as a supporting character in the epic of Darwin. During the upcoming bicentennial celebrations, lift a glass of Picardy cider in memory of the other father of Evolution.
Hey, no complicating history! It's all a linera upward progression to the idea of Victorian England...er...waitaminnint....
Posted by: Brian Rogers | February 11, 2009 at 03:17 PM