The self-making world

Long mocked and misunderstood, Lamarck’s radical idea that organisms shape themselves and their world is making a comeback

by Jessica Riskin  BIO

A pod of humpback whales making its way through Alaska’s Inside Passage. Courtesy of Far North Footage/Getty Images

is Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University in California, US. Her latest book is The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (2026).

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was 65 when his great treatise on the transformation of life was published. With Philosophie zoologique (1809), translated a century later as Zoological Philosophy, Lamarck intended to establish an entirely new science, one built on the idea that all living beings are constantly transforming themselves, from the tiniest microbes to the most complex mammals, gaining new forms and new abilities. It wasn’t the bodily structures of organisms that determined their ways of life, Lamarck said, but just the opposite: their ways of life in response to their circumstances gave rise to their changing bodily forms. ‘Can there be any consideration in natural history more important,’ he demanded, ‘or deserving of greater attention, than the one I have just set forth?’ (My translation.)

But if you’ve heard anything at all about Lamarck, it’s probably how wrong he was about one animal in particular, the giraffe, and how this giraffe fiasco epitomises his wrongness about everything. Lamarck suggested that, by stretching to reach leaves in high tree branches, giraffes slightly elongated their necks, creating tiny changes that were then handed down to their offspring, accumulating over many generations to produce the long necks we see today. Around the turn of the 20th century, Lamarck’s giraffe idea became a laughing stock when biologists roundly rejected the notion that bodily changes undergone in the course of an individual lifetime could be inherited in the next generation.

Illustration from Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749-1804) by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon. Courtesy the Linda Hall Library

It wasn’t only his ideas about long-necked mammals that came under attack. Lamarck’s interest in giraffes was just a passing mention in the midst of his voluminous writings, which set out a revolutionary, field-founding theory: organisms, he claimed, transform themselves and, in doing so, they remake the world. That idea has drawn scorn for more than two centuries.

Though Lamarck is often overlooked, his science was foundational to modern biology and informed the theory of evolution that Charles Darwin later developed. Darwin followed Lamarck in believing in the agency of living beings to transform themselves and their environment. But most people don’t know about Lamarck’s influence on Darwin because, around the turn of the 20th century, Darwin’s followers expurgated every trace of Lamarckism from their neo-Darwinist version of evolution, rendering living beings the objects of random variation and outside forces. For the neo-Darwinists, living things played no direct role in the evolutionary process. Evolution happened through random genetic variation and external environmental pressures. For Darwin’s followers, organisms were just as passive as they had been for the creationists, who saw them as products of divine will.

Throughout the history of modern biology, most powerful figures in science and politics have ridiculed and repressed Lamarck’s radical idea that organisms have agency in the evolutionary process. In mainstream biology today, a neo-Darwinian view of living things as passive still largely dominates, though research in several areas has been challenging its reign.

This is the story of how Lamarck’s radical idea was cast aside by mainstream science, and why it was overlooked for so long. It is also the story of a surprising reversal: in recent decades, some biologists have begun turning back toward Lamarck’s view of life.

While many people think of giraffes when they hear Lamarck’s name, few know that he coined the word ‘biology’, in 1802. He needed a name to designate a new science he thought should exist: a science of all living beings, and only living beings. At the time, there was no such field. There were broader sciences, such as natural history, which included inanimate things like rocks, rivers and mountains; and there were narrower sciences, such as botany or zoology, which covered subsets of the living world. But Lamarck thought there should be a science of life. At the heart of his new science, he developed the first theory of what we now call ‘evolution’, although he didn’t call it that. He simply referred to ‘change’.

Lamarck lived and worked in the Jardin des plantes (Garden of Plants) in Paris from 1788 until his death, aged 85, in 1829. His life was tumultuous, to say the least. He lived through the French Revolution, then under Napoleon, then during the Bourbon Restoration. He survived the Reign of Terror, as well as the withering disdain of Napoleon and his circle of scientific advisors, and the return of the monarchy; he also outlived three wives and four of his eight children. In the last decade of his life, he was blind and frail but carried on working with the help of his daughter Rosalie. At the end of his long career, he had identified and named more than 6,000 species, and for more than two decades had taught a legendary course in the Garden of Plants, drawing students from all over the world. The course grew so famous that even fictional characters attended it, such as the lovelorn young Amaury, hero of Sainte-Beuve’s autobiographical novel Volupté: The Sensual Man (1834).

The Garden of Plants, Paris. Courtesy Wikipedia

France’s National Museum of Natural History, located in the Garden of Plants

By daring to usurp God’s monopoly on Creation and reassign it to mortal beings, Lamarck provoked the ire of the mighty and powerful. He wrote that life originated in spontaneous generation, brought about by natural forces such as electricity and heat acting upon inanimate matter. This led to the emergence of the simplest organisms: single-celled protozoa and algae. From that point, a property intrinsic to living matter exerted itself, a tendency to complexify, which Lamarck named ‘the power of life’. As organisms grew more complex, another cause of transformation came into play: their responsiveness to the environment. In the simplest beings, this responsiveness was rudimentary – an irritability or sensitivity, and reflexive reaction. But in birds and mammals, Lamarck argued, it rose to the level of ‘acts of will’, through which creatures could form ‘habits’ and ‘ways of life’ in response to their circumstances. By means of these behaviours, they directed their inner fluids toward the limbs and organs they used most. (Darwin would later propose a similar idea. In 1868, he suggested that parts of the body threw off particles of inheritance, called ‘gemmules’, which were modified by an animal’s behaviours and could carry the modifications into its offspring.)

He imagined the simplest animals might reveal to him the foundation of animal life

Not only did living beings create and transform themselves, according to Lamarck’s picture of things, they also made and re-made the inanimate world. Plants played the primary role in this process, he thought, because they could invent themselves out of just sunlight, air and water. He described experiments to confirm this miraculous capacity. For instance, carve a hollow into the side of a turnip and suspend the vegetable in a window by its root, Houdini-style: nothing up its sleeves! Keep the hollow filled with water, and you’ll see that the turnip........

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