Idola Tribus: Lamarck, Politics and Religion in the Early Nineteenth Century

Abstract

There is no doubt that traditionally the history of evolutionary ideas has been and is Darwin-centred. I have no dispute with this, being a convinced " Darwinian " , in spite of years of work I have devoted to study Lamarck and the many non-Darwinian theories of evolution current in Europe and the United States before and after 1859. Whereas historians have paid some attention to post-Darwinian, non Darwinian theories, pre-Darwinian theories have been much neglected. Attention is usually paid to so-called " Lamarckian " attitudes present in European natural history debates from the early 1800s to the 1850s, only to conclude that Lamarck played no role, was almost unanimously neglected and in any case unanimously vituperated. This was hardly the case. However, the aim of my paper is not to vindicate Lamarck, but to argue that even concentration on Lamarck would amount to gross anachronism. After analysing reasons – essentially political and religious – that have been given to explain the alleged oblivion into which Lamarck's works had fallen (if they ever rose to attention) I will examine evidence concerning the wider debate on Lamarck's ideas within the medical literature of the 1810s and the 1820s. This will open up a new research area, focussed on the translation into French of major German authors (Meckel, Tiedemann, Carus, Treviranus, Burdach, Oken) and on the attempts to re-formulate key Lamarckian tenets in the terms of German natural philosophy, comparative anatomy and embryology, and medicine. The debate on the development of life – historical and embryological – was wider and much more interesting than the debate on Lamarck's own theories, which in any case well deserves to be rescued from oblivion. A. Fasolo (ed.), The Theory of Evolution and Its Impact, DOI 10.1007/978-88-470-1974-4_2, # Springer-Verlag Italia 2012 11 All differences taken into account, Lamarck and Darwin shared the common destiny of being often identified with doctrines they never upheld, or not exactly in the form history has attributed to them. Over the last century and one half, wave after wave of the recurrent debate on " Lamarckism " vs. " Darwinism " , and the repeated rituals of centenary and other anniversary celebrations have done much to obscure the real contribution of the two naturalists to the debates on evolution. In saying so, I am of course taking for granted several assumptions, some of which will be spelled out and discussed in the following pages. A major assumption which will not be critically scrutinized, and is presented here as a comment at the end of one year of world-wide celebrations, is that in-depth and easily available historical studies on Lamarck and Darwin have been rarely read or consulted by a good number of commentators who during 2009 have been very active explaining who Darwin really was. Nor have they been consulted by the much lower number of those who remembered that 2009 marked not only the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin, but also of the publication of the Philosophie zoologique, one of Lamarck's key evolutionary texts. The impression one gets, after reading, viewing, or listening to a statistically relevant portion of what has been said on Darwin during 2009 through several continents and languages, is that his works, as those of Lamarck, are not that well known, and that the work of professional historians who have engaged the primary sources is scarcely taken into account. This is not a novelty, after all: since the early 1800s much of the debate on what we call today " evolutionary " doctrines was carried on without much attention to the actual articulations of the " scientific " arguments under discussion. Before stating and developing the key themes of my paper, let me provide only one example of what I peremptorily stated above. There is no doubt that the doctrine of the inheritance of acquired characteristics is universally regarded as the cornerstone of Lamarck's theory and the major point of difference with Darwin and Darwinism. Yet, as Jean-Gayon has persuasively argued, and a rapid search by word of the Lamarckian corpus available on line will confirm, Lamarck never spoke of the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. 1 He most surely believed that new needs originate new behaviours, and new behaviours increase or decrease the size and functions of the solicited organs, to the point that new species and genera are formed. Life is thus constantly transformed, since the process is cumu-lative through inheritance. This was a conviction he shared with many authors active at the end of the eighteenth and at the beginning of the nineteenth Centuries, to the point that early critics of Lamarck rarely complimented or reproached him for this. The key issue when discussing Lamarck was always whether the process of change he had described was sufficient to overcome the species or the genus barrier – a point some were ready to concede – as well as higher divides (family, order) – which very few granted. Fifty years later, the same reaction characterized the early 1 Jean Gayon, " Lamarck Philosophe " , in P. Corsi et al., Lamarck philosophe de la nature, Paris, PUF, 2006, pp. 9–35. See P. Corsi, http://www.lamarck.cnrs.fr/ for the complete edition of Lamarck's theoretical works, his manuscripts and herbarium.