Lamarckism, The First Theory of Evolution

March 4, 2013 Marc Srour Leave a comment

These are the slides from a lecture I gave on Lamarckism last week, along with explanatory text.
It goes through the intellectual precedents of Lamarckism, an explanation of Lamarckism, how it
fares against natural selection, and an outline of its history. Here’s a PDF version.

Lamarckism may have been the first comprehensive theory of evolution, but it wasn’t invented
out of thin air by Lamarck. As with any theory, it’s founded on thoughts and principles already
found in scientific circles of the time. With Lamarckism, the two most important pre-existing
thoughts were the idea of the scala naturae, and the idea that species could change in different
environments.

The scala naturae, the “great chain of being”, is an idea that can be traced back to Aristotle and
probably before, and is basically a hierarchical classification system whereby those at the bottom
of the hierarchy are the simplest organisms and those at the top are the most complex. Imagery
based on it is still way too common and its influence is still pervasive in bad evolution
popularisation – the ideas that evolution has a direction or that humans are the pinnacle of
evolution are direct descendants of the scala naturae. The classical scala naturae is fairly similar
to that presented on the right: the four elements at the bottom, then metals, salts and rocks, then
mosses and plants, then insects, then seashells, then reptiles, then fish, then birds, then
quadrupeds, then humans. In less scientifically-minded texts, humans would be followed by
angels and, of course, God.
Scala naturae source: Bonnet C. 1745. Traité d’Insectologie.Vol. 1.

Ideas that species could change somehow were quite common in the early 19th century – this was
not Lamarck’s breakthrough. For example, Buffon, his mentor, pioneered his own ideas about
this, although all these concepts were rather vague.

Lamarck himself had a

somewhat torturous road to academia, having served well in the army before being discharged,
and going on to study four years of medicine before being dissuaded by his brother. He became
an understudy of leading French naturalist Bernard de Jussieu, concentrating on botany and, in
1978, publishing a three-volume compendium of the French flora that was impressive enough to
attract Buffon, who took him under his wing and got him a position at the French Academy of
Sciences and the royal botanical gardens. The aftermath of the French Revolution was a
reforming of the gardens into the National Museum of Natural History in 1793, in which he
gained the position of invertebrate professor (despite this not being his specialty), a position he
held until his death.

Biographical information aside, Lamarck is most famous for Lamarckian evolution (although, as
we will see, what we nowadays call Lamarckism is actually neo-Lamarckism). Besides this, we
take many of his advances for gratned – the word “biology” is his invention, as are the now-
ubiquitous systematic categories of “vertebrate”, “invertebrate”, “insect”, “crustacean”,
“arachnid”, “echinoderm”, and “annelid”. So do not think that he’s just some wacky naturalist of
the past who is now completely discredited: some of his work does still live on.
Anyway, our topic here is Lamarckism, his milestone idea about evolution that he outlined in
three of his publications. He first came to think about such things while sorting through
Bruguière‘s collection of fossil and extant molluscs at the Natural History Museum – he was the
previous curator of invertebrates and died. Lamarck realised that the fossil molluscs and the
extant ones are analogous, and by plotting their distribution in time, he could trace a direct
lineage from the ancestral species to the recent ones. This triggered the rest of the thoughts,
which he first exposed in his 1801 book, Recherches sur l’Organisation des Corps Vivants.

But the real explanations details of the evolutionary process came in what is considered his
magnum opus, 1809’s Philosophie Zoologique. 1815 saw the release of the first volume of his
new invertebrate textbook series, Histoire Naturelle des Animaux Sans Vertèbres, where he also
provides a summary of Lamarckism.
I already said that Lamarck was highly-influenced by ideas already floating around, especially
that of the great chain of beings. Lamarckism takes the idea of progression as its first core
foundation – organisms can be classified from simplest to most complex, and evolve in that
direction.
However, Lamarck went further than his contemporaries by trying to postulate a mechanism for
this progression, rather than taking it for granted. He proposed that animal life has some sort of
endowment built into it, an inherent ability to become more complex, and that would explain the
presence of a natural hierarchical classification.

This natural complexification can thus best be pictured not as a climb up a ladder, but by the
species staying static on an escalator. The axis naturally carries the species up an axis of
complexity – it’s just a matter of time for the species to transform from a simple morphology to a
complex one.
But if you think about it – as Lamarck did, of course – you would realise that there is a theory-
breaking problem with this proposition of an automatic, linear progression. It’s the classic
creationist argument: if we evolved from monkeys, why are monkeys still around? If this is a
linear progression, then they should already be human.

This is solved by saying that biogenesis – the formation of new life – is constantly happening. In
other words, there are many escalators (one for each category of life), and each one represents a
different starting point. Humans are the oldest organisms, and “worms” (they still lumped the
Vermes all together back then) are among the youngest, given their apparent simplicity.
But there is also a second problem, one of scale. A hierarchical classification that goes
something like worm-fish-reptile-bird-mammal-primate-human can be somehow justified by the
standards of of the day.

Now pick one category from those, the mammal for example. You have rodents, bats, canids,
felines, cetaceans, ungulates, pinnipeds. Making a sensible hierarchy out of these may be
possible.

Now choose on ofe these categories, for example the felines. You have house cats, bobcats,
ocelots, lions, tigers, pumas, leopards. At this point, making a hierarchy becomes an exercise in
senseless futility, and Lamarck recognised this, and this is where the most famous part of
Lamarckism comes in as an explanatory mechanism: the inheritance of acquired
characteristics.

It must be noted, though, that the inheritance of acquired characteristics is not Lamarck’s original
idea and was very widespread, although he did (unsuccessfully, as we will see) expand it with his
own original additions.
Inheritance of acquired characteristics is a fairly simple concept (at least it is if you forget all you
know about modern biology, as you’re supposed to do when examining history of science). I will
explain Lamarck’s version using the usual example of the giraffe.

So the giraffe is living in a savannah where the trees are growing taller. This induces a besoin (=
“need“, not “want” as is usually wrongly translated) in the giraffe, and it changes its behaviour
to be able to reach the taller branches. For example, it would extend its neck more. According to
Lamarck, this extra use of the neck would cause the neck to grow through the flow of more vital
fluid. This new neck state is an acquired characteristic, and it can be passed on to the offspring,
hence why we speak of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

The opposite is also true: if an organ is disused, then vital fluid will flow out of it and it will
atrophy. This explains why cave animals have reduced eyes, for example.

Giraffe source: gmacfadyen

Another example Lamarck used, just for your interest, is the membrane between the digits of
many swimming animals, like frogs, sea turtles, otters, and beavers. By swimming more, the
animal has a need to push water out of the way, and so the interdigital membrane gets used as a
paddle, causing more vital fluid to flow into it.
The key novelty in Lamarck’s concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was the
invocation of vital fluid. The real ruckus here isn’t much any physiological discovery (vital fluid
or anything close to it has never been discovered). Instead, it’s the completely naturalistic and
mechanistic view that postulating something like vital fluid espouses, and it was fairly
controversial at the time. One the social side, it was controversial because it does away with any
need for a God guiding evolution (although, as we will see later, theologians did a complete U-
turn when Darwin came into the picture!). And the concept of such a dynamic system went
against the predominant view of the time that while organisms may change, they only change in
preset ways – “there is an optimal phenotype for each environment. How it gets there, we don’t
know, but vital fluid isn’t it” would have been the reaction of the typical naturalist of the time.

So, to summarise, there are two foundational principles of Lamarckism. The first is the idea of a
natural, linear progression along a scale of complexity. However, as the diversity of life
demonstrates, there is a confounding factor leading to large meanders on the way to perfection:
organisms will adapt to their local environments, leading to a diversity of forms even at the same
level of complexity.

So, now that we know what Lamarckism is all about, we can get back to the modern age and
look at it critically, starting with what he got correct.

Any philosopher of science or thesis advisor will tell you that identifying the correct problems
and asking the right questions is half the step towards good science. And in that respect, Lamarck
excelled: he successfully figured out the four core problems of natural history of the time:

1. Why are fossil forms different than extant ones?

2. Why are some organisms more complex than others?
 3. Why is there so much diversity?
4. Why are organisms well-suited to their environment?

But beyond that, he failed at providing any correct explanation – although it must be stressed that
it was not through any fault of his own. If any of us (or Chucky) were alive at the time and
working with the same material, we most probably would have converged on a similar set of
ideas, and not on natural selection or mutationism.

Lamarck said that fossil forms are different because they always get replaced by the more
complex ones as the lineage goes up the escalator of complexity. We now know that fossil forms
are on a different part of a phylogeny and hence are different.

There is no such thing as a scale of complexity; complex traits arise in individual taxa as a result
of their unique circumstances. Most typical examples of complexity, e.g. multicellularity, are
unique phenomena that are in no way indicative of pervasive trends.

Diversity is not a product of constant biogenesis; all the evidence points to a single origin of life.
Diversity is a result of speciation.

There is no such thing as vital fluid. Organisms are seemingly well-suited to their environment
because the organisms that we see have made it through the unforgiving grinder of natural
selection. It’s a perceptory illusion more than anything else, really.
In natural selection as understood today, you consider a whole population of giraffes with
variable neck sizes. Those with the taller necks will be able to reach higher tree branches and
thus have access to more food. This gives them more energy and thus a slight advantage in
reproduction, meaning that in the long run, they will produce more offspring. Assuming a
genetic basis to neck length, this means that more offspring with taller necks are likely to be
born, meaning that they will outcompete the shorter-necked ones over many generations.

In Lamarckism, the giraffe needs to reach taller trees and so its neck lengthens, and that longer
neck gets passed on to the offspring.

It’s obvious to us now that this, the second core of Lamarckism, fails.