Ideas - Lamarck was wrong about evolution. Was he right about life?

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is mostly remembered for being wrong. He published an early theory of evolution, before Charles Darwin. His claim was that animals were in charge of their own evolution. That didn’t hold up. But author Jessica Riskinargues maybe it’s time to redeem Lamarck, a little bit. Riskin says that we should give animals — and humans — some credit for our own progress.Guest in this episode:Jessica Riskin is a historian of science at Stanford University, and author of The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

It's a wild ride these days on our planet. Yes, the climate is warming, but everything else kind of feels like a hot mess too. I'm Johanna Wagstaff, host of the podcast What on Earth. I'm a meteorologist, a scientist, and a pilot. So buckle up because I'm here to help you make sense of how people are changing the planet and what we can do about it. Every Saturday on What on Earth, we've got science-backed answers to questions that are actually popping up. We figure out what's a real solution and what's actually just messing things up. And because I'm constantly blown away by this amazing planet, we find a little wonder along the way. Find and follow what on Earth, wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. There's a simple way of thinking about evolution and natural selection. Random genetic variations make living things. more or less likely to survive. The less likely are picked off by predators, disease, or hunger. The more likely survive and pass those variations on

to the next generation. That's the story usually associated with Charles Darwin. But before Darwin, there was another idea that living things weren't simply shaped by the world around them. They shape themselves. It was proposed by French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who is often remembered today for being, well, wrong. This simple version of Lamarck's theory of evolution goes,

creatures change themselves during their lifetime and pass those changes along. The usual example given is giraffes. A hungry giraffe will spot some leaves high up in the branches and stretch its neck to take a bite. Over a lifetime of stretching and striving, the giraffe physically changes. Its neck gets longer and those physical changes get passed along to its offspring. Thirty years after Lamarck's death, Darwin published on the origin of species. Darwin's account of evolution transformed biology. and those hungry, willful giraffes became a punchline.

Lamarckism became shorthand for bad science. And that's the point at which Lamarck's ideas became sort of a laughingstock. People pointed to this giraffe example to show how very absurd Lamarck's ideas were. But in a new book, Jessica Riskin argues that Lamarck is more right and far more fascinating than we give him credit for. The book is The Power of Life, the invention of biology and the revolutionary science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. The story of evolution is much more complex than the recent reductive models have suggested. And I take hope in this dire moment that we're living through now, I take hope from the idea that creative power can't ultimately be controlled or monopolized.

Jessica Riskin is a professor of history at Stanford University in California. and she joins me from San Francisco. Hello. Hello. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for being with us. Before we get to Lamarck, the subject of your book,

I want to begin by asking a bigger picture question about what you do and your research. Much of your work focuses on the history of science and also the way we think about science. What are the major questions that you like to tackle in your research? Yeah, that is a big question, but I'm grateful for it because the thing that really I am most interested in, I would say, is what counts as a convincing explanation of the world? When do we consider, okay, now we have understood something? And why is this the explanation that we find satisfying? How has that changed over time? And, you know, when I started off in college, I started off thinking I wanted to be a physics major. And then I realized that I was sort of interested in meta-level questions, like, why is this the way physics looks today? And so I started taking history of science classes. And that's how I try to teach students to kind of think outside the box about the current state of scientific explanations and why they are the way they are. So how did those philosophical and historical questions lead you to Lamarck? Well, I came to Lamarck really through my previous book, which is called The Restless Clock.

And it's about what I came to see as a struggle in the life sciences between two sort of traditions starting in the 17th century. One tradition that saw living beings as machinery, kind of designed machinery like clocks and automatic organs and things. And in the early modern period in the 17th century, you know, the idea people had was that this machinery had been designed by a rational divine engineer. And so the machinery was totally passive. It just received its form from an external, supernatural, god. And then this competing tradition, which was kind of active mechanism, people who saw living beings as self-making and self-transforming and intrinsically active. And I kind of arrived at Lamarck at the end of that book as the kind of hero of the ultimate culminating hero of the active tradition,

and seeing living beings as self-making and self-transforming. And I thought, boy, I really should have written this book about Lamarck. He really should have been the hero of this book. But I had taken already so long to write the book. I could not imagine rewriting it at that point. So I just thought, well, you know, I'll give him his own book. And that's how I arrived at Lamarck. Wow.

What a thread to unspool, starting with a name and an idea. And that's what I'm hoping you could do for us, actually. Maybe you could kind of unpack those two ideas, just those two competing ideas. the idea of being a fixed, designed, passive being, and the competing notion of us, of beings being active and creative in the world that we live in. Sure, yeah. So I think, you know, what happened was that in the 17th century,

there emerged this tradition of people who were trying to see rational design in nature, often as a way of, so there was the argument from design, a proof of the existence of God. we know that God exists if we see that the world is designed in accordance with rational principles, there must have been a rational designer. And in fact, I would say actually that tradition of the argument from design reached its height with William Paley, the English theologian in the early 19th century.

And he told this famous kind of fable. He said, if I were crossing a heath and my foot hit a story. stone and you asked me, how did that stone get there? I could reasonably say, well, I don't know, maybe it was always there. But if my foot hit a watch, right, I'd have to know that there must be a watchmaker somewhere around who must have made this watch. So the same thing with design and nature. If we see design in nature, there must be a rational designer. Against that tradition, there emerged, especially in the 18th, middle of the 18th century in France, a whole bunch of people who wanted to try and explain the natural world without making an appeal to a supernatural god. A lot of mid-18th century

French people who were sort of challenging religious accounts of nature and trying to come up with rigorously naturalist accounts. And they began thinking about change over time because it's hard to imagine how a natural process could sort of happen all at once in one moment. If you really want to try and understand the order of nature as self-generating, I think you're led into thinking over time. And so the first evolutionary ideas about living beings came out of this tradition of French philosophers around the middle of the 18th century who wanted to try and think in rigorously naturalist terms. And Lamarck kind of came at the very end of that tradition. Lamarck was born in 1744 in France. In her book,

The book Riskin paints a picture of a young boy out of place. He wanted adventure. But instead, he was sent to the seminary. This is from the Power of Life, read by Elena Dere. He didn't want to be a priest. Nevertheless, Jean-Baptiste Lamarque, aged 11, found himself summarily packed off to study for the priesthood. At the Jesuit school in Amiens, an ancient city in Picardy in northern France. about a days travel by horse from the village where he'd been born and spent his first decade.

The plan of an ecclesiastical career was the obvious solution to his parents' problem of what to do with their 11th and youngest child and fourth son. Unfortunately, he felt not the least vocation for the priesthood. He envied his older brothers, who were soldiers. They returned from their campaigns in splendid uniform. and were greeted with grand parties attended by all the local nobility. But military careers were expensive. A commission could cost thousands of livres,

and launching these older sons had drained the family's resources. At Amiens, Lamarck could lodge in the seminary and study for free. Adding insult to injury, his family took to calling him, the little priest. Much later, when he observed that living beings continually respond to their circumstances in transformative ways, Lamarck was no doubt thinking of his own life. If you're a giraffe, living on the savannah, and the only food is high up in the trees, you have to stretch your neck and four legs to reach it, and they grow longer. If you're the 11th child of a family of impoverished military gentility,

you have to leave home at age 11 to attend the free Jesuit school about a day's ride away, studying for a career in the church, even though that's the last kind of career you want. But you learn Latin and Greek, grow intimate with the books in the school library, and gain access to the well-stocked natural sciences cabinet with its state-of-the-art instruments and charts. This was the rustic provincial setting, beyond whose confines, while grudgingly studying for the pre-structs, Lord, Lamarck began to discover a larger world. But when his father died in 1759, Lamarck's first words were, Well, then, I won't be a priest. And he flung off the hated clerical collar. And he flung off the hated seminarians collar. And off he went, he really wanted to be a soldier. So he took one of his mother's old horses and galloped on.

to join a regiment that was fighting in the seven years war. He got himself a letter of introduction from a local countess, and he just sort of presented himself there and started, you know, marched into battle. And he was in this military regiment for some years. But the next kind of twist of fate was that his regiment was garrisoned in Provence. And he was from Picardy in the north of France, but he was spending all this time in Provence, in the south, where it's a totally different landscape. And he was going to be a totally different landscape. and he was completely captivated by the wildflowers there. And he began being really interested in botany.

And he began studying botany, teaching himself. He traded a music notebook to his brother in exchange for a handbook of plants. And he took that around on rambles in the countryside. And he got help from a local pharmacist. And he taught himself botany. So he's a soldier and he becomes interested in nature. How does he end up making that his profession? So he had a neck injury or illness of some kind.

Now, according to Georges Cuvier, the paleontologist, who became Lamarck's arch nemesis and also the person in charge of writing his obituary. Anyway, in that mean eulogy, Cuvier says that Lamarck had a neck injury from being lifted by the head by a horsing around with a companion. And I've always wondered whether that was a reference. to the stretching of the giraffe's neck, which everybody associates with Lamarck's theory, maybe we'll come to that later. In any event, he had some sort of neck injury, and he had to leave the military. So he went to Paris for treatment, but then once he was there, he started

studying botany in earnest at the King's Garden, at the big botanical garden in Paris. He started taking courses in botany and medicine and kind of became a student in earnest at that point. So at what moment does Lamarck begin to suspect that species aren't fixed, that living things have histories and that they can change over time? Already, so already when he was studying botany, he was interested in the idea that the inanimate world is made by living organisms. He thought living beings were the only creative forces in the world. What makes a thing alive is that it composes and creates, and nothing else can do that. this was a radical idea because he was usurping God's monopoly on creation and reassigning it to living beings. And when he was studying plants, he said this process begins with plants because they are the only things that can compose just from the elements, just from sunlight and air and water.

They can compose this extraordinarily elaborate compound matter. He talks about bulbs. So a turnip, he says, if you suspend it in the window and you carve a hollow in its side and you fill the hollow with water, it will produce a whole. whole plant. Now, it has access to nothings hanging there in the window except sunlight, air, and water. What does he conclude from that? So, well, that plants are the only things in the world that can create, can pose from elements, compound matter. And so he thinks that all of the compound matter mineral matter in the world is made up of transformations of living matter. But then he had to switch once again, his career. He had to, during the revolution, go from, move from botany into zoology.

the Revolutionary Committee in charge of the reorganization of the botanical garden, assigned him not a position in botany, but a position, the lowliest position in zoology, as the professor of insects and worms, which I think is the most wonderful job title in the world. And I wanted actually to name the book, the Professor of Insects and Worms, but my editor persuaded me that the power of life would be a more attractive title. And who said no? That's a great title. Yeah, the Professor of Insects and Worms. And he told his students in that course that at first he had been really despairing because he thought, at least, you know, I wanted to study botany. If I didn't get to study botany, at least couldn't I have studied character, you know, more exciting animals, charismatic megafauna like lions and tigers. And then he realized that, in fact, he had a really interesting purview. It was nine-tenths of the animal world. So, you know, not a little unimportant corner, but a really interesting purview.

It was nine-tenths of the animal world, so not a little unimportant corner, but a really big domain. And he thought, maybe I can also understand in the simplest animals, they will help me understand the essence of animal life. And he decided that the essence of animal life was the power to create, to generate matter, organic matter, and to regenerate itself. And so moving from botany, the power of plants to generate matter, to the power of these simplest animals, the power of generation, I think it was in that transitional moment that he began to think in terms of self-creation and self-transformation in general across plants and animals. So how important is that to understanding Lamarck's theory that animals use acts of will to change? Well, I think it is important because basically Lamarck's idea was that living organisms are the agents of evolutionary change, that they shape evolutionary change through their behaviors in a kind of constant, responsive, creative striving. that birds and mammals by using a limb or not using it would influence its either growth and strengthening or its diminution and sort of fading away. So he gives lots of examples involving birds.

He says, for example, that shore birds that have those long, skinny, featherless legs, they, in fact, his idea is that they don't like the water. but they need to wade out into the water in order to get their food, right? And so they stretch their legs in order to hold their body out of the water. And they just in teeny tiny incremental ways, they lengthen their legs, but then again, those are accumulated as they hand them down from generation to generation. These tiny lengthening's become these long, long skinny legs. And similarly with their necks, long necks that they crane to reach the food without getting their body wet.

But then he says the way you know this is that ducks, ducks and swans, they don't mind the water. So they are swimming out there in the water that they don't have the long legs, but they still have the long necks because they crane their heads to reach down and get food from the bottom. So he has wonderful examples like that. He talks about the webbed feet of water birds also from pushing against the water. And the giraffes. And then the giraffes is the famous example that everybody knows. And that's what, you know, later biology rejected, the idea that organisms have any agency at all. You know, by the time, I think Charles Darwin accepted Lamarck's ideas on many levels, including the idea that the evolving organism has various forms of agency.

But later interpreters of Darwin eliminated that and really rendered the evolving organism entirely passive. And that's the point at which Lamarck's ideas became sort of a laughing, people pointed to this giraffe example to show how very absurd Lamarck's ideas were. Then the neo-Darwinists of the late 19th to early 20th century really took up that scornful tone in relation to Lamar. I do want to take another moment just to really clarify the point that you're making. So take someone like Richard Dawkins, the evolutionary biologist, who in the preface to his landmark book, The Selfish Gene, wrote,

We are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. How does that view and those kinds of metaphors conflict with what you are arguing? Yes, I think Dawkins, he is one of the main popularizers of this neo-Darwinist passive model of living beings as, as you just read, that was a beautifully representative example. And very anti-Lamarkian. I mean, he's written that any demonstration that Lamarck was right would destroy his world or something like that, you know, kind of very extravagant phrases like that.

And I think, yeah, I mean, there's been an interesting reversal. in the history of biology where Dawkins and his view came to seem like kind of sober science, sober modern science. And the Lamarckian idea of the agency of the organism came to seem sort of woo-woo, right, Lucy Goosey. And in fact, it was the opposite. The creationists were the ones who believed in a passive machine organism. And it was the rigorous naturalizers like Lamarck who wanted to try and understand how living forms could emerge from within the natural world from a process of self-transformation.

And somehow this reversal took place, I think, because the established powers in science around the turn of the 20th century, you know, they promulgated that passive view. And that came to be the kind of establishment view. And so Dawkins is the, I see Dawkins as the heir to the creationists of the 18th century, 18th to early 19th century, ironically. Insisting in this way on the agency and discretion of tiny creatures might seem like a small matter. But it was in fact an expression of Lamarck's radical view of life and of nature. Life, he decided, consisted simply of the capacity for a kind of organic, self-directed movement. Boldly, brazenly, Lamarck usurped God's monopoly on creation, ascribing it instead to mortal beings and down to the very humblest of them. Lamarck wrote that he had nothing against religious belief

and acknowledged that faith could be a consolation for the good man who persuades himself of it. But faith was of no use to Lamarck. He all but declared his atheism. Souls were not physically knowable, whereas the dynamic, creative action of living organisms was apparent everywhere. Life, as Lamarck now came to see it,

was the manifest capacity to create in the face of all nature's forces of destruction. There reigns throughout the universe an astonishing activity, he observed. He meant living things, doing the work of living, growing, reproducing, eating, digesting, moving, propagating life among themselves. But not only that.

To live, Lamarck thought, was to engage in a constant work of construction and combination, merging elements into compound matter and complex structure in valiant defiance of the rest of nature's tendency in the opposite direction, to destroy all combinations, to decompose and dissolve. These two powerful forces, life versus the rest of nature, were locked in ceaseless combat, each perpetually struggling to undo the work of the other. Without organic beings, therefore, none of the compounds

which are observed on our globe would ever have existed. The science of life was the study of this capacity for heroic creation, this defining faculty of organic beings, to compose and complexify themselves in the world, to which Lamarck gave the name, Couvez de la Vie, or The Power of Life. It was a worldview of stark beauty that Lamarck presented to his colleagues, and also to many, a scandalous one. I'm speaking with Jessica Riskin, author of the book The Power of Life, the invention of biology and the revolutionary science of Jean-Battiste Lamar.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Almost 3,000 people were killed in the 9-11 terrorist attacks. How did some of their remains end up in the world's largest landfill? They treated my son like garbage. So while the people who killed my son, I have certainly an animosity for them. I have a huge animosity for the people who were running New York. On the latest episode of Revisionist History, the story of a battle over what some see as a pile of dust and other see as the remains of the dead. Listen to Revisionous History wherever you get your podcasts.

LeMarc died in Paris, blind and destitute in 1829. He was buried in a common grave while all his possessions were sold off at auction. It was a grim end, and his scientific reputation today is equal. grim. But in the power of life, Jessica Riskin traces the threads of Lamarck's theories to more recent science of inheritance. And she argues that Lamarck can still give us a hopeful way to think about the world. I also find it extraordinary that Charles Darwin, who we know as sort of the authority on evolution in his book, The Origin of Species, that actually Lamarck's theory was right there in that book.

Always. Yeah, absolutely. No, Darwin used Lamarck's ideas in thinking his way into his own theory of evolution. He drew on Lamarck for sure. And on his own grandfather's ideas, Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin's grandfather had also suggested a kind of transformation of living forms. He was a doctor and a poet and a naturalist. And he had had similar ideas to Lamarx, although he didn't develop them into a theory the way Lamarck did. But Darwin, Darwin drew on both of those precursors and among others. And I think, you know, I will put this in kind of simple terms. Darwin was a Lamarckian in a couple of very important ways. One, he adopted the idea of transformation of living forms, which was a Lamarckian idea. And two, he believed that living organisms had agency. They shaped the course of evolution by their behaviors. So, for example, he believed in what we now call the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which Darwin called the inherited effects of use and disuse. That's, you know, Lamarck's idea of the giraffe, right? Stretching his neck. Darwin had that, he included that

in every addition of the origin of species. It's in everything he ever wrote. He never questioned what he called the inherited effects of use and disuse. And the reason I emphasize that is that Nowadays, people insist that Darwin rejected that Lamarckian idea. That's because his interpreters, Darwin's interpreters, after he died, insisted on this kind of false dichotomy between Darwin and Lamarck for reasons that I think are interesting, political reasons that I think are interesting that we can get into. But it's not true to Darwin himself. And the other thing, his theory of sexual selection is very much about animal agency and evolution. His idea was that animals shape the development of the transformation of their species by choosing mates according to their own standards of beauty and their own preferences. I mean, those are Darwin's words.

So that's an exertion of agency. That's creative agency. Absolutely, yeah. At what point does Lamarck definitively and his theories kind of fall out of favor, as you said, ridiculed? If indeed Charles Darwin himself believed in them, when did they be? become discredited? Yeah, well, I think, you know, already in Lamarck's lifetime, he was embattled. So I've mentioned already Georges, Georgesquivier, the paleontologist, comparative anatomist, who was Lamarck's colleague and who, and his nemesis. When I was writing the book, I came to sort of hear the Darth Vader

theme when QVEA would come on the scene because he was so much the villain. And, and, you know, KVee did very, very important work in comparative anatomy. He established the reality of extinctions. but he was a devout Lutheran. He categorically rejected the idea of transformation of living forms. He believed that organisms are designed by a divine creator and they retain the form that they received at creation until extinction, and then they're replaced by new acts of creation. So a purely passive model of what an organism is.

And Lamarck and Cuvier were, they had sort of opposite ideas. Lamarck said that behaviors produce structures, and Cuvier said structures produce the behaviors. The animal behaves as it was designed to behave. So he wrote this very disparaging, so-called eulogy of Lamarck, in which he said basically Lamarck's ideas are poetry, not science. And that kind of set the tone for, well, actually, I should add also that Cuvier was one of Napoleon's most trusted scientific advisors. And Napoleon also kind of developed a scorn for Lamarck and famously humiliated him when Lamarck tried to present his magnumopus, the zoological philosophy, to Napoleon in 1809.

Napoleon kind of spurned him and humiliated him. And, you know, I think the way I understand that, partly I think Napoleon was influenced by Cuvier and his other kind of members of his scientific inner circle who rejected Lamar's ideas. But partly, I think also the idea of a kind of distribution of creative agency all throughout the living world was really not what an autocrat like Napoleon was after he wanted to impose an order on the world not to study its self-creations and transformations. What about now? How well regarded is the idea that animals and humans, for that matter, have any control over their own evolution? That is partly what got me so interested in Lamarck is that I think that some of his ideas have been returning to mainstream science in the last couple generations in really exciting ways. So, you know, I end the book with this really maybe polemical sentence. Lamarck was right after having gone through the ways in which current science has been returning to some of his ideas.

And I think it's important to be really clear what I mean when I, you know, When I say that someone who died in 1829 was right, he didn't know anything about genetics, of course. There's a lot of science he didn't know. But what I mean is that he was right that living organisms have evolutionary agency, that their actions and behaviors shape the course of evolution. And there are all kinds of ways in which biologists today are studying that. So one example, which I think is the most maybe literal example, is the study of epigenetic inheritance, which is the study of structures outside of the DNA that shape gene expression.

And these structures can change in an individual lifetime and be handed down from generation to generation. And they shape the way the genes act in the body. And so they affect the course of evolution. So that might be the most literal sort of Lamarckian inheritance that people are studying today. And the study of epigenetic inheritance is still in its early days, but it's everywhere. you know, people are finding all examples of epigenetic inheritance in every kind of organism. I've actually been involved in a study. I've managed to instigate, ask some friends who are biologists to conduct a study of epigenetic inheritance in giraffes. So that's currently under review.

What's the question at the heart of that research? Yeah. So I wondered whether anybody had studied epigenetic inheritance in giraffes, and I plundered, you know, the internet and tried to find something and couldn't find, asked around. I couldn't find anything. And so working with Mike Skinner at Washington State and my colleague Mark Feldman at Stanford and the Draft Conservation Foundation in Namibia gave us DNA samples, cheek swabs from two different species of giraffes, which my daughter thought was the funniest thing she ever heard. She was imagining a very long Q-tip. But we, so we, when I say we, I mean Mike Skinner and his lab analyzed these samples and found that, that there are epigenetic differences in the DNA between two species of giraffes and between

giraffes and Okopi, which are the closest relative of giraffes. There are epigenetic differences in them. Now, that's just a very, very first stage. What do those epigenetic differences mean? How do they relate to phenotypic differences in the body? How might they relate to the environment? We don't know any of that yet. But they tell you something.

But if they exist, that's already interesting. if they exist. Because? Because it means that these species of giraffes, which are different from one another, have come to differ in ways that are not just genetic, but outside the genome, outside the DNA. And so it's not just genetic inheritance. Inheritance is much more complicated, I think, than people considered it for a long time. People had a very reductive understanding of inheritance, and it's now becoming less reductive. A more sobering example of inherited epigenetic changes involves a fear that was transmitted across generations of mice in a laboratory. These mice didn't lose their tails, but they did receive mild

electric shocks to their feet at the same time that they smelled a certain odor. Acetophenone, a clear, sweet-smelling liquid that people experience variously as smelling like almonds, oranges or cherries. After a few experiences like this, the mice, unsurprisingly, began to be startled whenever they smelled the odor. The extraordinary thing, though, is that when they later had children,

the offspring too were startled by the odor of acetophenone, although they had never experienced the unpleasant shocks to their feet. Moreover, the children's children, the grandchildren of the original mice, showed the same startle response. Parents can, of course, transmit fears to their children in all kinds of ways. But findings like these, suggesting that traumatic experiences might leave physical traces in the body that are inherited by subsequent generations, have given rise to much discussion of the

notion of epigenetically inherited intergenerational trauma. Researchers have found corresponding epigenetic and behavioral changes in the human children of survivors of great traumas, such as the concentration camps of World War II, a six-month famine in the Netherlands, and the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. A more hopeful finding is that it appears that recovery can also happen at an epigenetic level. When veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder received therapy, their DNA showed changes in the methylation patterns associated with trauma. And when the mice were retrained to lose their fear of the sweet smell, their next litters of offspring were unafraid, too. The field of epigenetics is quite young, and much remains unknown,

such as how long epigenetic modifications can persist from generation to generation, and, importantly, Whether these changes ever show demonstrable connections to animal behaviors or habits, as in Lamarck's theory, but already scientists have gathered evidence of epigenetic inheritance in all forms of life, bacteria, fungi, protozoans, plants, invertebrates, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, suggesting that epigenetic inheritance is ubiquitous. I'm sensing maybe partially kind of an effort to vindicate what Lamarck was trying to say. Well, yes, I mean, maybe not directly, because again, you know, he was writing in 1829. So I don't know that we would want to take his ideas as kind of direct accounts of inheritance of the kind that we would, that that, that,

a scientist would want to publish today. But in a larger sense, yes, I think the idea of kind of a self-transformative agency in organisms, that is the essential Lamarckian idea. And I think it is being vindicated, not just an epigenetic inheritance, but in other areas as well. For example, niche construction, the idea that animals produce, they create their immediate environments, like think of beaver dams or birds nests or, you know, there are all kinds of many, many ways in which animals transform their immediate environment, which then exerts selective pressure on them. So it's a two-way street. That's another area. The study of animal behaviors directing natural selection. So one of my favorite examples of that is a woman at Yale named Martha Munoz, who studies

lizards who have moved up from sea level to 3,000 meters where it's much colder. And she describes how the lizards have been behaviorally nimble, and they've figured out, you know, they warm themselves on the sun-baked rock, and then they scurry into crevices to hide from predators. And so rather than evolving physiological cold tolerance, what they've evolved is features that make it easier to scurry into crevices like flat heads and short legs. And are those features that are inherited subsequently? And they're, well, so they are, I mean, what this is is behavior leading genetic, leading natural selection, which affects genetic inheritance, right? So they're inherited genetically, but led by

evolution. There's another study of Darwin's finches in the Galapagos carried out by Peter and Rosemary Grant, who looked at speciation over 40 years in Darwin's finches. And what they saw is similar. It's that the populations of finches separated behaviorally long before they were genetically distinct. They divided themselves into different populations and stopped reproducing together long before they were incompatible genetically. So again, that's behavior leading genetic change and natural selection. I think those things are just fascinating. And I'll just give one final example, which is that there's now people are biologists very much interested in the study of animal cultures. So there's this group called the extended evolutionary synthesis that I've

come to know through, again, my colleague Mark Feldman, I mentioned, is a member of that group. and they have been trying to extend the evolutionary picture to include these other aspects. And one of them is animal cultures like whales who develop hunting techniques, different hunting techniques in different parts of the ocean, and hand those techniques down from generation to generation. So that's a form of cultural inheritance in whales that influences their ability to survive. So it's crucially important to evolution. So these are all the various areas. to at the end of the book, these various areas in which I think people are vindicating Lamarck's idea that organisms have agency and evolution.

You end, as you mentioned earlier, you end your book with a very striking line. Lamarck was right, is what you say. But there have been reviews, and I know you've seen them, where some biologists are pushing right back on that conclusion. I have one example here from David Barish, a psychology professor emeritus. I think he's a psychologist, yeah. Yeah, at the University of Washington. In reviewing the book, he argues that epigenetics is at most a kind of limited kind of Lamarckism.

Let me just read a quote from him. He says, for one thing, genes themselves aren't changed by epigenetic experiences. Rather, certain pre-existing genes are turned on or off. As modern scientists would put it, the gene's expression is modified but not the underlying DNA. In short, epigenetics is at most lomarchism light. Very light, close quote. That's what he says. And then he ends kind of with this very blunt line at the end saying Everskin ends the power of life with the conclusion. LaMarc was right. Nope, he wasn't and neither is she. Yes. How do you respond to that kind of criticism?

Specifically that epigenetics or any other modern way of looking at genetics doesn't redeem Lamarck. Yes. Okay. Well, thank you for that question. You know, I'm grateful for that kind of review because I was trying to be let's see, I was trying to start a conversation, and I'm grateful when people respond, right? If people just sort of ignore your attempts to provoke them, then that's disappointing. So I'm happy that he responded. Let me address, first of all, the question of epigenetics. I mean, I think the important point about epigenetics, as I understand it, is that it influences the course of natural selection, and therefore it influences genetic evolution as well.

So it's not that the epigenetic structures change the gene that they are on or around, but rather that by influencing gene expression, they influence the course of natural selection, which influences genetic evolution. And I'll give an example of that. So Mike Skinner, who I mentioned, who's a colleague on this giraffe experiment, He's been interested in the ways in which epigenetic changes precede and lead genetic changes. So he did a study of another, I mentioned another study of Darwin's Finches, but Mike did one of Darwin's Finches showing epigenetic differences between species of Darwin's finches living in urban environments in the Galapagos versus ones living in rural environments. And what he shows in that paper is that the epigenetic changes are much faster.

And so they kind of lead the way, and then genetic changes follow, a little bit also like what Peter and Rosemary Grant, I think, showed in their study. And so the point is that epigenetic changes are a part of the process. And then another important thing that I want to say in response to that reviewer is that it isn't – epigenetic inheritance is just one example. I've given other examples, niche construction, animal behaviors leading natural selection, animal cultures. So there are sort of, I think now this kind of area of research is kind of exploding. People are finding all kinds of different ways in which extra genetic phenomena influence the course of evolution. And if we understand Lamarck in that more capacious sense of, you know, that his central idea, was that organisms

influence the course of evolution through their experiences and behaviors and responses, then it seems to me that all of these areas of research, not just epigenetics, but kind of the whole extended, all the areas of the extended evolutionary synthesis are vindications of Lamarck.

I do want to make crystal clear what you mean by your ideas, these ideas that you're explaining to us and just maybe begin with, this concept. When you talk about agency, and I think you just gave some examples, but when you speak about these greater forms having agency, what do you mean by agency? Yeah, that's such a good question, and it's such a hard question because it means different things in different contexts. But I would just say that what I mean by organisms having agency is that they respond to their

environment in ways that are not reducible to a kind of programming or mechanism that are sort of open and in some instances creative, and that those actions, behaviors, responses, make a difference to the course of evolution. And, you know, I think I'll go back to something I said earlier about how Darwin's interpreters around the turn of the 20th century, revised Darwinian evolution to render the organism totally passive again. And I think that there's a politics to this history. You know, the idea that living beings are the passive objects of outside forces or of sort of, you know, random variation and outside forces imposing structure on them. That idea, it was compatible with creationism, I think,

the neo-Darwinist around the turn of the 20th century, many of them like the German biologist August Weissmann, made this explicit that their version of Darwinian theory was very compatible with a creator because the organism was passive. So the source of order could still come from an external source. So I think there was that. But I think the kind of passive model of living beings, including human beings, has been useful for. or all kinds of powers who wanted to impose their own order on living beings and human beings. So I was surprised to discover the extent to which the neo-Darwinists of the early to mid-20th century were eugenicists, open eugenicists. People like Julian Huxley, Francis Crick. I mean, they kind of spoke explicitly about eugenics, you know, published,

and eugenic journals and belong to eugenic societies. And their idea was we can harness this knowledge and we can remake life, including human beings. So the passivity of the living being, I think, has been useful to kind of powerful entities from one period to the next. I say at the end of the book also that I think it has been connected with, as Lamarck said in his last book, right? The idea that the living world is sort of raw material to be shaped

and how we want, to our own advantage, you know, has been associated with a couple centuries of environmental destruction and kind of plunder. And so I think there's been an important politics to the promulgation of a passive model of living beings. Lamarck, who witnessed the Industrial Revolution firsthand, warned of this. In his last work, the analytical system of human knowledge, written in 1820 when Lamarck was infirm, blind, and dismissed and ridiculed by most of the powerful figures in science

and politics, he lamented, in a fit of despondency, that people were selfish and short-sighted, careless for the future, wantonly annihilating their own means of conservation, and working toward the destruction of their own species and of all living things. He pointed out deforestation and its consequences. Destroying the trees and large plants that protected the soil to satisfy the greed of the moment, man quickly brings sterility to this soil, causes the springs to dry up, drives away the animals who found their subsistence there, and causes great parts of the globe, once very fertile and highly populated, to now be bare, barren, uninhabited, and deserted. Human beings' passions led them to ignore experience, to carry on waging wars and plundering nature

for riches. It looks, Lamarck concluded despairingly, as if man were destined to exterminate himself after making the globe uninhabitable. Finally, you have a chapter in your book called Science and Poetry. Yes. When you look at the life and work of Lamarck, what stands out to you about the relationship between science and poetry? Yeah, so I mentioned that Cuvier, in his very nasty, non-ulogistic eulogy of Lamarck, said, condemned Lamarck science as poetry, not science.

And that really was a theme, I think, not just in. relation to Lamarck, but in general, in the development of science across the 19th century and into the 20th century, there was a real kind of effort on the part of people like Cuvier and later figures, especially in the history of the life sciences, actually, I think, to insist on the borders of science, to insist on the rupture between science and all other ways of thinking about the world. and to promote this much narrower model of what science is. And so actually in my next sort of the project that I'm getting into now,

I really want to try and look at this rupture between science and all other humanistic and aesthetic ways of understanding and try and understand that moment of divorce because I think that was impoverishing on both sides. And I think it would be, I want to try and understand how it happened and see whether there are ways of moving back towards a more integral intellectual world that's not so fragmented in that way.

You've told an incredible story here that is of interest to scientists and to historians, and I just wonder what you want the average reader to take away from your book. Oh, well, I hope that the average reader will take away a sense that the story of evolution is much more complex than the, kind of recent reductive models have suggested that the living world is full of creative agency

and response and is in a continual state of self-transformation. And I think, as I say in the preface to the book, I take hope in this sort of dire moment that we're living through now. I take hope from Lamarck's science, from the idea that creative power can't ultimately be controlled or monopolized. It is distributed throughout the living world. There is something hopeful about that. Yeah, I hope so. Jessica Riskin, thank you very, very much for your time and your insights. Well, thank you so much. It's been really wonderful getting to talk to you about my book. I'm really grateful. I was speaking with Jessica Riskin, historian of science at Stanford University in California, and author of The Power of Life, the invention of biology.

and the revolutionary science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Special thanks to Ellen Adair and Penguin Random House for selections from the audiobook. This episode was produced by Matthew Laysen Ryder. Our technical producer is Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Senior producer Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas,

and I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC podcast, Go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.