Jessica Riskin

His theory was reduced to one idea–that giraffe’s necks grew long because they had to stretch to reach the leaves on trees. Lamarck believed that species had the power to change themselves at a time when most accepted the Biblical story of creation which denied the idea of change or evolution.

Riskin’s book is filled with information but is never dry.

What Jean-Baptiste Lamarck accomplished in a time of political turmoil is amazing. Lamarck began as a botanist until the French Revolution show more when he was arbitrarily assigned his job as zoologist in charge of insects and worm study. (Then, he was lucky to still have a job—and his head—with Robespierre in charge!) He went on to create a new taxonomy of animals–invertebrates. He came to believe “they revealed the essence and foundation of animal life” through the “gradation” of their forms.

Life, as Lamarck now came to see it, was the manifest capacity to create in the face of all nature’s forces of destruction.” from The Power of Life by Jessica Riskin

His study of Murex mollusks convinced him that they “selectively” created and altered their shells, a radical idea that “life…consisted simply of the capacity for a kind of organic, self-directed movement.” He called it the power of life, the force that drove living things to change and improve itself over time. Creatures could respond to their environment!

Riskin shows how Lamarck was the father of ideas we now accept, tracing the impact of his ideas across two hundred years, including the work of Darwin, the Eugenics movement, and epigenetics. She ends: Lamarck was right.

Thanks to Riverhead Books for a free book. show less

hard to read, very academic, tedious at times
note book #835