348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency

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1:30Eczema's unrelenting itch and rash. If you know the feeling, you should know the facts. The eczema medication you're taking may not be right for you. Visit MyRawTruth.com and talk to your dermatologist about your symptoms and treatment options. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. There's kind of a pattern that we each individually go through when we learn something about science, some aspect of how the natural world works. First, we start by looking at the world, and we know that it looks very complicated.

2:02Later, we learn that there's this brilliant scientific insight that actually simplifies our description of the world. And we're very happy because we have this compact, austere, powerful formalism that can explain so much. And then we realize that actually that really simple, powerful formalism gets complicated a little bit, either intrinsically complicated when we want to include more things, or just complicated because applying it to the real world is a little bit trickier than we originally thought.

2:33So Newtonian mechanics was an enormous simplification. You know, if you read about Aristotle or other degrees of other ways of thinking about physics back in the day, there was a lot going on. It wasn't clear what was biology, what was physics, etc. And then through the work of many, many generations of smart people, we learned to start by ignoring air resistance and friction. And Galileo showed us how to do these experiments to really isolate the simple essence of it. And we culminated in Newtonian mechanics in an extraordinarily powerful theory of the world.

3:07And then we learn later when we, as individuals, learn about Newtonian mechanics, it gets complicated because there is friction in the real world, and there is quantum mechanics and relativity and things like that. So this pattern of enormous complexity being simplified and then maybe a little bit complicated again is true both for individuals learning science, but also for science as a field learning about the world.

Biology and Evolution

3:34Another aspect besides physics is, of course, biology, evolutionary biology. There was a lot of work done for thousands of years in thinking about the different kinds of species that existed, eventually realizing that they changed over time, they evolved in the broadest possible sense. And then Darwin, of course, made a huge leap forward with natural selection. And there was ultimately, in the 20th century, the modern synthesis, where we glued together modern genetics with Darwinian natural selection,

4:06and we really had an extraordinarily powerful view of the nature and origin of species. But then things became complicated again. And these days, you know, the frontier work is in pointing out that our individual genetic inheritance is not just the specific genome that we get in the nuclei of our cells from the DNA that we inherit from our parents, but also there are epigenetic factors.

4:36There are chemicals that work to express certain genes rather than others. We inherit mitochondrial DNA as well as the nuclear DNA. We inherit aspects of our microbiome from our mothers and things like that. And not to mention that there are influences of culture on the biology that we have, because certain genes are going to be passed down and certain ones are not. So we're making this story a little bit more complicated again. And at that moment when we were simplifying it the most in evolutionary biology,

5:09it was interesting and fun to contrast the view that we had of evolutionary biology with what could have been and was shown to be wrong. And in this case, one of the villains of the conventional story was Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who was a predecessor of Darwin who came up with a theory of evolution, but one that was not based on random mutation and sexual selection, but rather—and sexual mixing, I should say, of your genetic inheritance,

5:41but rather inheritance of acquired characteristics. So a giraffe, in Lamarck's theory, would have a neck growing for longer and longer because generations of giraffes would be straining to reach the leaves on the tops of the trees. And from all that straining, not only would the individual giraffe get a longer neck, but it would be able to pass down that longer neck to its descendants. This story from Lamarck was not part of the modern synthesis of Darwinian natural selection,

6:16where you just had a genome, it was just randomly mixed up by a mutation and, of course, father-mother sexual mixing and things like that. It was not, you know, an effort that went into creating the features of future generations. So that was laughed at, that Lamarckian idea.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

6:37Today's guest, Jessica Riskin, is a historian of science, and she wants to kind of rehabilitate Lamarck a little bit. Not all the way, like certainly not overturning anything Darwin said and replacing it with what Lamarck said, but she points out that Darwin himself really agreed with many of Lamarck's ideas, and many of these very recent modifications of the standard Darwinian synthesis have a certain Lamarckian flavor. But I think that what she's mostly after is a shift of emphasis, not just specific scientific ideas.

7:12But, you know, Lamarck was a champion of the idea that organisms, living beings, were not designed by either an intelligent designer or just by the external forces of nature, but that inside individual organisms, the organisms themselves played a role in creating who they were and maybe even who their ancestors would be. I think it's that sort of change of emphasis that Jessica is more about than anything else. And the wonderful story with all the historical anecdotes and all the biographical details

7:45is told in her new book called The Power of Life, The Invention of Biology, and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. And it has implications not just for this particular historical event, but for how we think about how science is done and how we think about how we human beings live in the broader natural world. So let's go.

Interview with Jessica Riskin

8:15Jessica Rizkin, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. Thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Now, you've written a book, The Power of Life, about a controversial figure in the history of biology. But I thought that it would be fun to actually start talking about a previous book you've written that both sort of overlaps even more obviously with my own interests, but also leads into your second book.

8:46So the first book was The Restless Clock, a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick. And like all those words sound great to me, and I love them, but maybe why don't you try to explain to the audience what the book was about? Sure, yes. And in fact, the Lamarck book comes directly out of that earlier book. So The Restless Clock was really about a sort of a struggle that I see as having taken place in the life sciences and the history of biology between two competing models of a living being.

9:19According to one model, a living being is a kind of designed machine that has been designed in a certain way and functions in that way. It's the object of outside forces. In the first instance, in the 17th century, those outside forces were a designer god. And in the modern neo-Darwinist version of it, the outside forces are natural selection. But in either case, the organism is this kind of machine that is fairly passive.

9:52The competing tradition is one that I think of as active mechanism in which the organism is itself self-making and self-transforming and constantly redesigning itself rather than being just acted upon from outside. And so The Restless Clock traces the struggle between those two competing models of a living being from the 17th century, pretty much up to the present anyway, up through the 20th century. And when I got to the end of writing that book, I sort of realized that

10:27Lamarck should have been huge in that book because he really is the hero of the active mechanist tradition. You know, he really is the hero, the champion of the idea of the creative agency of living organisms. And so I got sort of to the end. He's in there a little bit, but I was sort of in the final stages of writing that book. And I just thought, you know, this book should have been about Lamarck. But I cannot. I had taken so long writing the book. I was like, I can't start over again. I can't go back and rewrite this book.

10:58And so then I just thought, oh, well, I'll give him his own book. I'll just have to give him his own book. So that's how I got it. That's how I got it out of the process. That's how a good author thinks. That's great. So I think it's fascinating how our metaphors for ourselves and for life and whatever are always responding to the culture around us. Like, basically, you seem to be saying that in the beginning of the Enlightenment, when machines and automata first came on the scene, instantly a certain segment of people said,

11:32oh, we're like that. And a certain other set of people resisted a little bit. Yeah, that's right. I mean, one of the things, one of the kind of discoveries of working on the Restless Clock book is that, you know, there were automatic machines, automata and hydraulic organs and clocks and all kinds of things all around the early modern European world and churches and in wealthy estates and things. And so part of the fun of writing that book was to go around and I actually went and visited

12:04some of these machines. I went to Salzburg and I saw these extraordinary automata that would, you know, gargoyles that would stick out their tongue and a chair that you would sit in and it would grab you and stuff like that. I actually went there with my son who's now, you know, this was a while ago. So he was a little boy at the time and he was completely enthralled by this. And I realized, you know, that these machines have been entertaining small children and other people for centuries, you know.

12:34And so these machines were everywhere and people did indeed in the 17th century start trying to think. So Descartes, the French philosopher Descartes, lived for a time near the French royal palace at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. And there were lots of these grottos, hydraulic grottos. They were, you know, they were kind of arranged in this kind of neo-Gothic way. And so he, he probably, I don't know, we don't know, he probably visited them and he

13:06describes them in his writing. And Descartes, of course, is the great theorist of, you know, living bodies as machinery. So, yeah, people were trying to think in these terms about what a living being, an animal or a human could be. And I'll just add one more thing, which is that I had a PhD student a few years ago, now teaching at St. John's College. Hallie Barnett, his name is, he did a beautiful dissertation, which I hope is on its way into being published as a book, which is called Homo Musicus. And it's about how people in the 18th century used musical instruments as models of living

13:42beings. They, in the way that we use information machinery, we use computers, they use clavichords and harpsichords and, you know, cellos, vibrating strings and all of that. So, yes, exactly. We draw on the machines or the models that are around us. So don't be disturbed about the dog barking in the background. The audience loves that. We're not going to edit that out. We're going to leave that in there. My dog. But so, I mean, maybe I'm wrong. But let me just say, I could put her in the car, though. No, no, no.

14:12That would be, we love the dog in the, whatever. It adds a little bit of reality to it. That's how we know you're not AI. Actually, it's probably not, because you could probably trick that into the AI. But maybe I'm wrong about when these kinds of machines did appear on the scene. Were they around before the 17th century, the similar kinds of machines? Mechanical clocks had been around for some centuries before the 17th century. You know, high middle, they date back to the high middle ages. I think, you know, 13th, 14th century, maybe 14th century.

14:45And then another sort of important development was the camshaft, you know, the barrel with pegs sticking out of it. Like you see in a music box, you see a miniature version of that, a little barrel with pins that trigger a sequence of motions. You know, the pegs trigger levers that attach to other things. And so you see some of these quite elaborate automata governed, programmed by camshafts in the, you know, early 17th century, turn of the 16th and 17th century.

15:20There are some quite extraordinary, I have some beautiful designs in there. For example, a host of birds, like a bunch of little figures of birds that are flittering and twittering. And then an owl that's, that is pivoting towards them. And the whole thing, you see the design for it. This is a design by a French engineer named Isaac Ducous. And you see, he has a drawing of this. You see the camshaft turning and the pegs sticking out of it and triggering valves in a set of pipes. And the whole thing is being run by a water wheel.

15:51And so as the camshaft is turning, the birds are twittering, the owl is turning towards them. When he faces the birds, the mechanism is braked. So they freeze. And as it goes away again, they start fluttering and twittering. So these are, you know, the programming devices of the early modern period camshafts. And they, there's a direct line of development from those to automatic looms, which are mid 18th century, the first designs for automatic looms that, that, you know, that the cams triggered the raising and lowering of, of warp threads, or is it the woof?

16:30I guess it's, I can't remember which is the warp and which is the woof. I'm not going to provide any help on this one. And to punch cards, the first punch cards were in automatic looms. And then Charles Babbage, the early 19th century English mathematician and inventor, designed his mechanical calculating engines, the analytical engine and the difference engine, on the model of the automatic looms. And so you can see this kind of continuous line of, of development from early modern camshafts through automatic looms, through, uh, punch cards, through, of course, modern computing.

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17:37When you've got a one-track mind, you go where the cravings take you. Welcome to Racetrack. Breakfast that satisfies. Snacks that sing. Drinks that refresh.

17:50It's a stop that pulls you in. We don't blame you for having a one-track mind, because once you stop at Racetrack, no other stop will do. Same time tomorrow? You know it. Racetrack. Whatever gets you going. And am I right in my wild speculation that this technological development did influence the idea that people could be understood along similar lines as machines? I think absolutely, yeah. I think, you know, I'll go back to Descartes, who, again, you know, he was the kind of major theorist of the idea that you could understand living beings in the way that you understand clockwork, artificial mechanical devices.

18:34And I think, yes, I mean, he looked around himself and he tells stories of visiting these hydraulic grottoes where you step into the grotto and, like, there's a figure of a Diana or some, you know, goddess who flees when you step in. And that the fact that the automata seem to respond to one another and to visitors, to him, he sort of, he really emphasizes that, that they seem like they're engaging and responding. And so it's not that he thought that, you know, I think it's not that he thought that animals or people genuinely were clockwork, but that you could try to understand animal and human machinery in comparable terms, in terms of material parts.

19:23And I think the fact that he saw these machines all around certainly encouraged that. And so try to make it clear for us what the other option is. Like, look, I'm a physicist at heart. I understand when you say, like, OK, there's machines and they're made of pieces and they obey laws and they come together to make a bigger thing. What is the sort of more romantic, agentic alternative to that? Well, first of all, I can start with the older tradition. I mean, so traditionally, kind of according to an Aristotelian picture of living things, they have, Aristotle described three different kinds of souls.

20:04So he said that plants have a vegetative soul that causes them to grow. Animals have a vegetative soul and a sensitive soul that causes them to grow and sense. And then people have a vegetative soul, a sensitive soul and a rational soul so that they can grow, they can sense and they can reason. And Descartes got rid of two of the three souls. He said, really, there's no such thing as an animal, a vegetative soul or a sensitive soul. Those are just he says, basically, you can call them souls if you want. But I see those as substances.

20:35And the only soul that he retained was the rational soul in human beings. So and then in the 18th century, very kind of much more thoroughgoing materialists, not dualists like Descartes, but people like the French philosopher Lamitrie or Diderot, a lot of mid-18th century French people got rid of the rational soul. They basically said, OK, let's you took it some of the way. Let's now take it the rest of the way and get rid of the rational soul to everything should be describable in terms of moving parts.

21:11But then there are various different possibilities for these moving parts. Have they been put together by some outside force and they just tick, tick, tick, tick function the way, you know, the way a clockmaker makes a clock? Or are they themselves changing and transforming and recreating themselves? And how did they come to be in this extraordinary organization that that is a living thing? Did they just did it happen all at once by someone arranging them or did they arrange themselves? And so that's the big conflict, the big struggle.

21:43And you have in this period, the argument from design.

21:49This is a kind of 17th century, you know, the first people who made the argument from design, people like John Ray, the English theologian, Robert Boyle, English chemist, physicist and theologian. And they it's a 17th century idea. And what they said was you can demonstrate the existence of a kind of designer God, rational, omnipotent being from the evidence of mechanical design in nature. And so they got very, very interested in the kind of very minute considerations of mechanisms like the mechanism I or the or, you know, an insect, tiny, minute investigations of the appearance of design in nature.

22:35And that tradition culminated with William Paley in the beginning of the 19th century, who famously said, you know, that his very famous version of the argument from design is if you're crossing a heath and your foot hits a rock, you might think, well, that rock just has always been there. Who knows how that got there? But if your foot hits a watch, you know that there has to be a watchmaker somewhere around. That was his version. But what's interesting about that is that it assumes passivity on the part of the watch, right?

23:06I mean, it assumes it's just kind of lying there like a rock to be kicked aside. What if it yelped and scuttled away? That would be a very different matter. Then you might not necessarily think there's a watchmaker. You might think somehow that watch got there on its own volition, right? And so that's the competing model that culminates with Lamarck is the idea that – and already people like the ones I mentioned, Lamaitrie and Diderot and other kind of mid-18th century Frenchmen who were very rigorous naturalizers and kind of materialists, they already had been trying to imagine a way that these living mechanisms could have come to be gradually over time in a internal, self-made way.

23:47Not by having an order outside, but by gradually transforming many, many, many generations. They began also to think their way into deep time, this kind of deep abyss of time. And Lamarck comes at the end of that active mechanist of trying to imagine how these living machines could have made themselves. I think that's super helpful because I think I did misunderstand a little bit the distinction. I mean, it's hard to get out of one's own location in space and time. And I sort of associate a kind of mechanistic, naturalistic, physicalist point of view with one of your options and a more romantic, theological, magical point of view with the other one.

24:29But you're making the point, and I think it's completely true historically, that it was the people who thought of living beings as machines that were more theological about it, that were using that to prove the existence of God. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, I'm so glad you said that. That's exactly my point, is that, right, Lamarck and the others in his tradition get a reputation for being sort of woo-woo, you know, mystical. And nothing could be farther from the truth. It's the exact opposite.

25:00These are the people who wanted to not make any appeal to a supernatural God. And so they were trying to imagine how it could happen from within without appeal to a supernatural God. And it was the, you know, the kind of very mechanist, engineer kind of model, people who were advocating that kind of engineering model of a way of studying living machinery. Those were the people who, that tradition emerged from the argument from design.

25:32It came out of a theology. And so the way I think, I sort of think of it shorthand is that I think that Richard Dawkins, ironically, is the heir to William Paley. He doesn't see it that way, but I think that's really the case. Well, and I guess if you're going to, it does make sense in retrospect, right, because you're saying that if you really analogize living beings to machines, machines in our experiences are designed by somebody outside.

26:03And so that kind of goes hand in hand. And if the real distinction is, are the changes and evolution and agency coming from within us or from outside, then it's the external point of view that's going to go along both with the machine metaphor and with the argument from design. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's interesting that Charles Darwin, you know, he kind of later in life reminisced about having, when he was a student at Cambridge, he memorized Paley. He said he could basically recite Paley from memory and he, you can sort of hear it in his prose.

26:37He's a very, very beautiful, I think a beautiful writer, Charles Darwin, a really beautiful kind of stylist of the English language, but it kind of resonates, it echoes a little bit Paley. And, and yet he said, you know, I'm, so I'm basically taking Paley and getting rid of God and replacing God with natural selection. I mean, Darwin didn't put it that way. I should hasten to say he was very, very careful always to tell people that they don't have to choose between God and Darwin, that the two are compatible. But nevertheless, I think his idea was that he could put natural selection in the spot where Paley had God.

27:11And the problem with that is that the model of what a living thing is sort of has a kind of supernaturalism built into it. You know, if, if you really think that the organism is totally passive, then where, then it suggests that the, that agency is somewhere else. It's kind of outsources it to a, a, an external God. And, you know, Darwin, but, but I, another thing I want to, though, emphasize is that Darwin didn't fully adopt that model.

27:41He partly adopted Paley's model with natural selection playing the role of God, but he also adopted Lamarck's model. And that's something that I think cannot be emphasized enough because everybody nowadays represents them as opposites. But Darwin was a Lamarckian in a very important sense. He adopted Lamarck's idea of what we now call the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The idea that an organism, a living being changes itself through its behaviors in teeny tiny infinitesimal ways. Then those are inherited by its offspring. And then you add together those infinitesimal changes, thousands of generations.

28:15And, and you get like the giraffe's long neck.

28:19Darwin never questioned that. It's in every edition of the origin of species. He called it the inherited effects of use and disuse. And it's in every edition of the origin of species. It's in the descent of man. It's in everything he ever wrote. He believed that. And so he had, he, I, I see him as very torn between the Paley passive model and the Lamarck active model. And he, he's torn and struggling with that problem. Good. So the real distinction in some sense that you want to draw, I'm just trying to like get it in my head because I am very embedded in these modern debates.

28:50Um, is the, is the, is the self creation of who you are by the organisms, not just being shaped by external forces in the, in the first book in the restless clock. Yeah, that's right. I mean, the restless clock is really about that struggle between active and passive mechanism between those two models of what a living being is. And, um, it seems to me that the neo-Darwinist tradition, you know, not Darwin himself, but the neo-Darwinist tradition, um, as I say, you know, are the heirs to Paley.

29:21They carry on that passive model, um, and, and, uh, Lamarck sort of, uh, the active mechanism model has been largely banished from mainstream science for, um, you know, over a hundred years. And I think there are really interesting reasons for that. There are kind of, there's a politics to it. Um, in the first instance in the, in the later 19th century, um, I think it had to do with, uh, leaving room for a, an omnipotent God sort of out there behind the scenes.

29:53So Darwin was acutely conscious that Lamarckism had this ill odor of radicalism and revolution, regicide, atheism. Um, he, because Lamarck had developed his theories during the French Revolution and published them sort of in the midst of all of that. And, um, and actually Charles Darwin's own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had come up with similar ideas. He was a doctor and a naturalist, Erasmus Darwin, and he, um, had a similar idea to Lamarck's of, of transformation of living forms from generation to generation.

30:30But he, uh, didn't develop it into a systematic theory the way Lamarck did. But Erasmus Darwin also, he was a poet, he expressed a lot of his ideas in poetry, he was a romantic, and he was a, um, a political radical. He was very admiring of the French Revolutionaries. And so Charles Darwin, you know, had this kind of, he was a little embarrassed, he was a little worried about all of this, you know, uh, radical, romantic, dangerous aura to his ideas. And so, um, he was very careful, as I say, to insist that you didn't have to choose between God and Darwin.

31:03But I think as you move through the 19th century, increasingly, you know, um, Darwin's followers have the idea that if they want to, uh, sort of, for, for Darwinism, an evolutionary theory to, um, kind of really, uh, persuade people and be very successful, that they have to kind of, um, do something about this problem. You know, they have to make it seem, uh, sober and, and not dangerous in this way. And, and, and so they eradicated all traces of Lamarckian inheritance, what Darwin called the inherited effects of use and disuse.

31:36His followers got rid of that very adamantly, especially, uh, a German, uh, uh, Darwinist evolutionist named August Weissmann. Um, and he, uh, carried out these experiments that have become very famous that you may have heard of with mice. Do you know the Weissmann's mouse experiment? Let's assume I do not know that one. I know it because I looked in your book, but tell me what it is. Yeah. Yeah. So he, he, um, he chopped the tails off, uh, mice that he did this for several generations. And he showed that the tails, that the offspring of the mice had perfectly normal tails.

32:09He himself knew that this was really not a, uh, a refutation of Lamarck or Darwin because neither of them had said that amputations were inherited. Both of them had believed that organisms transformed themselves from within by their habits, by their behaviors, not that an amputation would be inherited. That would be a weird one. Yeah. And Weissmann knew that perfectly well. And he even said that, but he said, you know, this will refute the, uh, popular version of belief and inheritance of acquired characteristics. It was really sort of a gimmick, but it was extraordinarily powerful.

32:41And people still have that in, in, in textbooks, uh, biology textbooks as a refutation of Lamarckian inheritance. Um, and so, uh, yeah, so the, uh, from the end of the 19th century, turn of the 20th century, you see a neo-Darwinist theory emerge in which Lamarckian inheritance is absolutely banished. There's no inheritance of acquired characteristics. And there's a lot of insistence on the absolute and utter passivity of the organism. Uh, and people actually kind of make, uh, uh, slide from evolutionary passivity to behavioral passivity.

33:14You know, you begin to see that, uh, animals are just the vehicles of their, well, we haven't gotten to genes until the middle of the 20th century, but, um, that kind of slide from evolutionary behavioral passivity is already taking place. And then by the time you get to the mid 20th century, it's that, uh, animals are just the vehicles of their genes. There's a better way to buy blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery, and it's called three-day blinds. Three-day blinds is the leading manufacturer of custom blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery. And we've been doing this for over 45 years.

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34:52Intro rate first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at MintMobile.com. Well, I mean, your new book, The Power of Life, is a combination of science and history and biography.

Lamarck's Theory

35:03So I did want a chance to give you a chance to do the biography part. I mean, tell us about this guy, Jean-Baptiste Lamarque. Who is he? What if you've never heard of him before? Where was he born? What did he do? Okay. Yes, thank you. So he was born in 1744 in Picardie in northern France. And he was the 11th and youngest child and fourth son of a family from the military nobility. But they were sort of a family, you know, they were, their funds were dwindling already.

35:38And by the time they got around to Lamarque, they had already spent all of their money on his older brother's military career. It was very, very expensive to launch a military career. And so Lamarque had to be, at age 11, sent off to study for the priesthood. And he really hated that idea. He didn't want to be a priest.

35:56And when his father died a few years later, he said, that's it, I won't be a priest. And he went galloping off on one of his mother's old horses to join a regiment that was fighting in the Seven Years' War in Central Europe. Then he was a soldier for a while. Then he had to leave the military.

36:12So Georges Cuvier, who was Lamarque's archenemy, also, funny story, had the job of writing his eulogy, so-called eulogy. It's the worst, nastiest, meanest eulogy you've ever seen. But he kind of nastily insinuated that Lamarque had been lifted by the head by one of his fellow soldiers. And, you know, they were horsing around. Anyway, he had some kind of neck injury. And so he left the military. Meanwhile, he had fallen in love with wildflowers. His regiment had been garrisoned in Provence. And he had fallen in love with wildflowers and decided he wanted to be a botanist.

36:44And so off he went to Paris to be a botanist. And for a while he was a botanist. Shall I keep going? Oh, yes, I love it. So he was studying botany in Paris. But also he was living in a garret apartment right up under the roof. A poor student. And so all he could see were clouds. And so he started also studying clouds. And he became the first person to name the clouds, to categorize. He was a very tidy sort of guy. He liked to taxonomize.

37:15He ended up naming over 6,000 species of animals and vertebrates and other living species. But he also taxonomized the clouds and named them. And ultimately set up the first government weather bureau. He developed a science of meteorology and set up the first government weather bureau. But where was I? So he was studying botany. And he caught the interest of Georges Buffon, who was an extraordinarily prolific naturalist and well-connected guy who was the director of the Royal Botanical Garden.

37:46And made Lamarck his protege. And that was all very excellent for a while. Until, but then in 1788, Buffon died. 1789 was the revolution. Everything was thrown into total turmoil. Lamarck helps to shepherd the garden through the revolution and even to build a new museum of natural history in the heart of it. But when it came time to give professorships in this new museum of natural history, he was not allowed to have a botany professorship because the botanists who were already in place in the garden didn't want him to.

38:19And so in the end, he had to take the lowliest of the zoology professorships, which was the professorship in insects and worms. He became professor of insects and worms in the garden. And I initially wanted to call my book The Professor of Insects and Worms because I thought that would be a novel title. But my editor didn't like that title. I think your title was better than the one. I mean, the title you have now is fine, but A Professor of Insects and Worms is even better, I think. But because it really struck me when I was leaving through the book, you know, I suppose we have a similar thing now with very highly specialized microbiology professors or whatever.

38:56But back then, you could be like the professor of mollusks or something like that. It was just like a wonderful set of specializations that people could have. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, he renamed it. So he was professor of insects and worms, which was Linnaeus's ginormous category of all insects and worms. But it included mollusks, interestingly. Mollusks were worms, according to that. And it was Lamarck who coined the term invertebrates. Right. That was his coinage. And so he renamed his designated creatures.

39:29Invertebrate biology sounds better than Professor of Insects and Worms.

39:35OK, but this is all. So this is by the end of the French Revolution. We've gotten up to now. We are. Yes, we are sort of. Well, at the moment when he became Professor of Insects and Worms, it was right embroiled in the midst of the French Revolution. And then he survived that. And Napoleon came in, you know, made himself emperor, et cetera. And Napoleon hated Lamarck. He was really he loathed Lamarck and Lamarck's science. He was the one who shut down Lamarck's weather bureau and really tried to undermine him at every turn.

40:09There's a story that told by the astronomer. So this is in your line. I'm Francois Aragot. He was a young man at the time that this story took place. But he told the story that in 1809, when Lamarck published his magnum opus, the Philosophie zoologique, the zoological philosophy, where he presents his theory of evolution for the first time to the world, that he and Aragot were among all of the members of the National Institute, waiting nervously in a salon of the palace, of the Tuileries Palace, waiting to present their work to Napoleon.

40:42And Napoleon finally came sweeping in and marched up to Aragot and said, you're very young. What's your name? Aragot had a kind of awkward exchange where everybody was trying to answer for him. And then he turned to Lamarck and said, you know, what is that you're holding? And he snatched Lamarck's book and he kind of thrust it into the hands of an aide and said, you know, this is basically nonsense. Your work is all nonsense. And poor Lamarck was reduced to tears of humiliation.

41:13And so famously, he had to weather the scorn and loathing of Napoleon and all of Napoleon's inner circle, Cuvier and everybody. What was that story? The first interaction between them? I mean, my question is, why does the emperor of France keep track of the professors of insects and worms? That doesn't seem to be the kind of thing going on now. Oh, but he was. He was very interested in science and very closely, you know, so it wouldn't have been their first exchange, I don't think.

41:44I mean, he knew. So Napoleon had this close kind of inner circle of scientists who included Georges Cuvier, who was the paleontologist, and Laplace, the astronomer and mathematician, Laplace, and Fourcroix, the chemist. And they, all of them, hated Lamarck. And so this was already in full swing. And there are various reasons for that. I mean, I think one thing is that Cuvier was a devout Lutheran.

42:14He rejected transformism, you know, evolution. He absolutely rejected it. Another reason is that Napoleon certainly didn't like this participatory meteorological program. He was not into participatory. Napoleon was into top down. Right, yeah. And then the last thing I'll just say about that is that I think it also had to do with the substance of Lamarck's theory, that his theory was all about distributing creative agency and transformational power all throughout the living world. And again, Napoleon was not interested in that.

42:46He wanted to control nature, control the living world. He didn't want to learn all about how it transforms and reshapes itself. So I think it was not a congenial theory to Napoleon. It also, you know, Napoleon was trying to court the monarchists. And the idea of this kind of atheistic-sounding theory was bad, you know, bad PR. There were various—I think it was overdetermined, but certainly Napoleon was not a fan of it. Well, that was another question I had because, you know, sometimes, again, all of us can't help but project our current concerns onto these long-ago battles.

43:22So sometimes you read, like, that this or that scientific theory encountered resistance from priests and theologians because it was thought to be against whatever doctrine they held. And I always wonder whether that was actually a big deal at the time or whether people now are projecting the fact that it should have been a big deal given the implications of these scientific theories. But I guess what I'm hearing from you is it kind of was a big deal in the moment.

43:52Well, yeah, it's a really good question because I think you're absolutely right about that. So, for example, in my—I teach a course on the scientific revolution where we—I talk about Galileo and Copernicanism. And there's a really good example of just exactly what you're saying, which is people assume because they know that—often people know that Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition of heresy. And they assume that Copernicanism was in trouble with the church from the beginning. But nothing could be farther from the truth. Copernicus was a church canon doing church business.

44:25He was trying to come up with a plan for calendar reform. The church was very, very worried about calculating dates of feast days like Easter. Yeah, Easter. Which is the first full moon after the first Sunday after the vernal equinox. So you have to correlate solar and lunar calendars. And it was a mess. People were celebrating Easter all over Christendom at the wrong times, different times. And so Copernicus was a church canon working on a church problem. And in fact, the Catholic Church was like the NSF of early modern Europe.

44:59They funded, you know, especially in astronomy, but in various areas. And so it's really an interesting thing. I mean, it was never—it was not necessarily the case that the church was going to condemn Copernicanism. And it happened in a kind of complicated way with Galileo. You know, that's a story for another day. But it's just—that's an excellent example of what you're describing, you know, that people assume that there would have been a conflict. But there wasn't necessarily. So in the case of Lamarck, what's interesting is that in the middle of the 18th century in France, there was this moment of sort of rigorous naturalism and a kind of materialism.

45:36And in that moment, it was—you know, plenty of people were coming up with—you know, there was plenty of anti-clericalism, plenty of criticisms of the church, and that was happening, right? But then you have this kind of reactionary moment in the 19th century under Napoleon and following, you know, as you go deeper into the 19th century. And so it's also not the case that it's uniform—that there's a uniform progress toward greater and greater secularism over time. There are these kind of—there's a complicated history to these sorts of things. And the final thing I'll say is that, you know, I was mentioning that Charles Darwin was very concerned about, you know, insisting that his theory was compatible with religious faith.

46:17But in fact, it didn't—it really—the conflict between Darwinian evolution and the church really came to a head, for the most part, not immediately in England in the 19th century, but in America in the 1920s. There's a kind of delay and a removal of that conflict to America. So, yeah, it's a very complicated and fascinating history of relations between science and the church and various church authorities. If we're trying to sort of think about what it was like to live back then, I mean, is it at least safe to say that there seems to be more connection between the highest levels of scientific and intellectual theorizing

46:57and the highest levels of power politically in a way that maybe there isn't today? But maybe I'm wrong. Oh, yes. I mean, well, certainly not today. I mean, Napoleon was—as I say, he was very, very interested in science and very, you know, he kind of, I think, had the sense that modern scientific authority and power and modern political authority and power went right together. You know, he went off to Egypt with all of his scientific retinue and he wanted them to be doing science there.

47:29And so he really had the sense that the two went together, that this was the kind of supreme modern political authority would be grounded in a kind of natural science. I think Napoleon certainly believed that. But I would say that, you know, often I talk about how, in this scientific revolution class, about how the modern partnership between science and government really began to take shape at the end of the 17th century with the founding of institutions like the Royal Society of London or the French National Academy of Sciences.

48:05And that, you know, then you see that relationship developing. And I think right now in the United States of America, for the first time when I teach this material, I have to say to students, that modern partnership seems to be possibly at an end or any way under threat in a way that I absolutely didn't foresee. So what we see now is kind of stunning. There was just a piece in today's, was it today?

48:29Maybe it was in the Sunday paper, actually, about the destruction of science in America. Yeah, it was in the New York Times this Sunday. That was bipartisan. The idea that science and the state need each other was totally bipartisan. Well, we do tend to think that the conditions we're in right now are eternal and we project them both to the past and to the future. But it just is never true in either direction. So it's hard to predict. But OK, anyway, thank you very much for these digressions. They're exactly why we're here. And I love them.

Lamarck's Biography and Legacy

48:55But let's get back to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. And we haven't yet had him come up with his influential theory. Right. OK, so his theory. Let's see, where shall I start? So the book is called The Power of Life instead of the Professor of Insects and Worms. But that phrase, that's his phrase, Le Pouvoir de la Vie, The Power of Life, he uses that phrase to name a force that he thought was intrinsic to living matter that caused it to complexify just that.

49:26Right. And so it was sort of equivalent to the forces of contemporary physics, which were full of tendencies like electricity follows a conductor. People were very interested in studying that in that moment. Gravity causes common matter to tend downward toward the center of the earth. You know, magnetized objects attract or repel. So he was, Le Pouvoir de la Vie, if the power of life maybe sounds, again, it maybe has a woo-woo sort of sound to it. But in fact, what he meant was a very material force like the forces in contemporary physics.

49:57And what he thought was that it all begins with spontaneous generation, with forces like heat or electricity acting on inanimate matter, causing a spontaneous generation of the very, very, very simplest forms of life. Single-celled organisms called monads and algae. And then from that moment, the power of life takes over, causing it to complexify, sort of ever outward, complexify and ramify. And then as living forms get more and more complex, they, well, they begin responding to the environment.

50:30And they respond, the forms of life respond in very rudimentary ways. But he says, as they become more and more complex, these species, they respond in more and more complicated ways until you get to the level of birds and mammals. The level of birds and mammals respond by acts of will, by forming habits in response to their circumstance. Like the giraffe, stretch its neck, tie up leaves. That's the example of a nose from Lamarck. And those acts of will, those habits, those behaviors cause tiny changes that then get added together, inherited and added together over many generations.

51:07And you get dramatic structures, but over a kind of deep well of time. And then there's one more thing I'll say about this, which is that Lamarck thought that living organisms were not just creating and transforming themselves, but that they were also creating the inanimate world around them. He basically said living things are the only creative forces in the world. So he's seizing God's monopoly on creation and reassigning it to living being. And they're the only creative things in the world, and they are creating the inanimate world around them. And he says, I don't really know how the whole thing started, but what I know is, you know, mineral or animal, vegetable, mineral, what came first.

51:45But what I do know is that in the world we see, the kind of mineral structure of the world is formed by living beings and the things they make, like, you know, the White Cliffs of Dover are made of organisms. And, you know, continents and coastlines are shaped by living beings. So he described not only living beings creating and transforming themselves, but also the inanimate world around them. There's a better way to buy blinds, shades, shutters, and drapery, and it's called Three Day Blinds.

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52:52So for a free, no-charge, no-obligation consultation, head to 3dayblinds.com slash podcast for our buy one, get one 50% off deal. That's the number three, dayblinds.com slash podcast. Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook project, Hail Mary.

53:25Massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science and what happens when you wake up alone very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yo, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic.

53:59That's great. Because it served the story. People will say, like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

54:13Which in some sense you can't argue with, right? We do shape our environments. And indeed, like part of what you're saying kind of sounds, and we'll probably get there in a bit, but it sounds like modern theories of biological, cultural co-evolution where, you know, ideas can shape our biology and vice versa. Absolutely. So, well, one thing is that I started, you know, I tried to find out what current geologists think about this. And I, you know, talked with some people and tried to read some papers in geology.

54:46And it seems to me that there is a lot of interest in the role of living beings in forming the surface mineralogy of the earth, really. So there was, you know, the great oxidation event that took place with the first living organisms that seeded the atmosphere with oxygen. And without that oxygen, you wouldn't have the same minerals. And so that's one, you know, example. But I think that, yeah, in today's geology and kind of earth sciences, there is a great deal of interest in exactly that, the role of living organisms.

55:23And I think actually also exobiology or exogeology, people who study the idea of life on the planet. Exo-biology, yeah. Yeah, that's something that people look for, right? The biology that reflects the presence of living beings. So, okay, so that's one sense in which Lamarck is sort of continuous, I think, with current science. But also, I would say that, you know, one of the reasons I was interested in Lamarck is that some of his ideas are really coming back into mainstream biology in a way they had been banished for all that time.

55:56But I think that biologists today are very interested in various ways in which organisms can shape the course of evolution. And, you know, there's, for example, this movement in biology, the extended evolutionary synthesis. My colleague Mark Feldman at Stanford is a member of that movement. I've gotten to know a little bit about it through him and Kevin Layla at University of St. Andrews. And so these are people who are interested in trying to reincorporate developmental and ecological and behavioral and even cultural elements back into the evolutionary picture.

56:37Because, so it's called the extended evolutionary synthesis in kind of response to the modern synthesis Huxley declared in 1942, which was the marriage of genetics and neo-Darwinism. And according to the modern synthesis, it was a very, very, I think, a very, it has been a very reductive and kind of confined idea that there's random genetic variation, purely random genetic variation, natural selection. And so the extended evolutionary synthesis, people are trying to open, reopen the field of explanation beyond that.

57:09So if I understand it correctly, the two big ingredients for Lamarck are, one, this tendency towards complexification. And number two, the inheritance of acquired characteristics. So like, so it's not what Weissman was testing with his amputations. But if I work out and get stronger, it's possible that my children will be stronger because of that. Right. And actually, not just Darwin, I mean, Lamarck has, I mean, sorry, not just Lamarck, but Darwin also was interested in those ideas, you know, the blacksmith's arm and, you know, the idea that you might have.

57:47I mean, yeah, those are, those are in keeping with the sort of canonical examples that Lamarck offers, for example, the water birds who stretch their toes in order to paddle in the water. And they end up getting, you know, very, very slightly each time more webbed, webbing between their toes. He has this wonderful passage where he talks about, he thinks that water birds actually, let's see, how does he describe it? He says that shore birds who don't like the water, they don't really want to be in the water, but they want to wade out to get food.

58:22And so they stretch their legs and they crane their necks. And so that's how you get the very, very long skinny legs. Whereas, he says, ducks and swans, they like the water. And so they don't get those, they don't stretch their legs, they get their, but they get long necks because.

58:39So it has to do also with their likes and dislikes. And this is something that Darwin picked up among other places in his theory of sexual selection. Because according to sexual selection, Darwin describes animals by choosing mates according to their own standards of beauty and sexiness. They shape kind of one another from generation to generation. And so Darwin actually talks about sexual selection as a kind of, you know, animals exerting their standards of beauty and their aesthetic senses.

59:13So that's, you know, very much in keeping with Lamarck. I don't know if you know about the, you know, speaking of the other ingredient, the increased complexification. I had a podcast guest a couple of months ago, or maybe it's over a year ago now, Michael Wong, who recently came out with a new book with Robert Hazen called Time's Second Arrow, where they propose a law of increasing functional information, which is basically their way of quantifying the idea that organisms as a whole do grow more complex over time. Oh, that is beautiful. I will read that. You know, Robert Hazen is among the people I was just thinking of when I was talking about current geology and interest in, yeah.

59:54I think that, yeah, there's details there. That's a whole other thing. But I mean, I do, yeah, so I get the spirit of what you're trying to say, because there's certainly elements in Lamarck that absolutely are still there or even being rediscovered now. So, not to oversimplify it, but I'll say in the oversimplified version, then you can fix it for me. It was the inheritance of acquired characteristics aspect of Lamarck's thought that some people decided was the opposite of what Darwin said, and therefore we should banish it from our discussions.

1:00:31But nowadays, we're sort of rediscovering the kind of senses in which maybe something like that is actually real. Yeah, I think there are a few different ways, actually. I can mention a few different, you know, because the last line of the book, which I realize is very polemical, the last line of the book is, Lamarck was right. And of course, what do I mean by somebody who died in 1829 being right about evolution? He didn't know anything about genetics, he didn't know. So, I want to be very careful to specify what I mean by that, is that animal behavior plays a role in shaping the course of evolution.

1:01:03But there are various different ways. Oh, two things I want to be careful about. First of all, I mean that animal behavior is a role in shaping the course of evolution, and also, I don't mean Darwin was wrong. When I say Lamarck was right, as I say, Darwin was a Lamarckian, and he believed in the disease. But anyway, a few different ways in which behavior can shape the course of evolution, or in which acquired characteristics can be inherited. One example that everybody thinks of, I think, nowadays, is epigenetic changes. And so, epigenetic inheritance refers to structures that are outside of the DNA, that are sort of around the DNA, that affect gene expression, and that can therefore influence the course of evolution.

1:01:46And people have been, you know, that's a big area now of research in biology, and there are examples in every form of life, in every possible context. But I have gotten involved, actually, this is one of the fun aspects of my, kind of this great adventure of this Lamarck book, is that I've managed to persuade some very nice biologists to do a research experiment on epigenetic inheritance in giraffes. And I've never been involved in a science experiment, being a historian, but I really wondered, first, it started because I really wondered, has anybody ever studied epigenetic inheritance in giraffes?

1:02:19The reason, you know, giraffes are the emblematic Lamarck animal, everybody thinks of giraffes, and epigenetic inheritance, it seems, can be, that is to say, epigenetic changes in a given individual lifetime can be inherited in the next generation. So, those are acquired changes that can be inherited, a kind of Lamarckian inheritance. So, I wondered if anybody had studied epigenetic inheritance in giraffes. I couldn't find anything. I asked biologists who said, yeah, you're right. And so, we've done this experiment, working with the Giraffe Conservation Foundation in Namibia.

1:02:54They sent us cheek swabs. When I told my daughter this, she just thought that was the most hilarious thing she'd ever, she was imagining a very, very long Q-tip. Yeah. Anyway, they sent us cheek swabs from two different species of giraffes, and okapi, which are the closest relative to giraffes with a much shorter neck. And we have found, when I say we, I mean my collaborator biologists have found that there are epigenetic differences between the two species of giraffes and between giraffes and okapi.

1:03:25This is just a very, very preliminary experiment. I mean, we don't, you know, you'd have to do a lot more work now to find out what those might mean. And it's also under review, it's not yet published, but it's been very cool to be a part of that research. So, that's one example, epigenetic inheritance. Another example is behavior. So, there's this, well, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who were evolutionary biologists at Princeton, a married couple and partners in science, and they studied Darwin's finches in the Galapagos, and they showed speciation happening there in real time over 40 years.

1:04:04And what they showed was that behavioral isolation of populations preceded reproductive isolation, genetic isolation, which is to say that the population stopped mating long before they became infertile, which they knew because if it happened once in a blue moon, there would be offspring. Right. You see what I mean? So, the behavioral isolation preceded the genetic isolation, and that is sort of behavior-leading natural selection.

1:04:38There's another example of this, a woman at Yale named Martha Munoz, who's an extraordinary researcher who has studied lizards in the Dominican Republic that have moved up from sea level all the way to 3,000 meters where it's cold. And she has shown that by being, she says, behaviorally nimble, they have, instead of evolving cold tolerance, what they have done is they have, they heat themselves on the sun-baked rock, and then they have to scurry into crevices to escape predators. And so, they've evolved things that make it easy to hide in a crevice, like flat head and short legs.

1:05:11And so, it's, again, behavior-leading natural selection, which is – and then just one last thing, which Mark Feldman, my colleague and friend that I mentioned earlier at Stanford, he's been very involved in the field of niche construction, which is that the animal shapes the environmental niche that then exerts pressures upon it, so it's a two-way street. So, there are all kinds of examples of ways in which I would say, you know, in my broader meaning of that sentence, little Mark was right. Well, I'm very well aware, as a physicist, of the love that scientists have for finding the simplest possible way of talking about things.

1:05:47And the idea that we have some genome, some list of base pairs in our DNA, and basically that's everything, that's what gets handed down, that's what has all the effects on who we are, is very seductive. But being that biology is much more complicated than physics, in the end, I'm not surprised that, in fact, there's not a direct one-to-one map from the genome to who we are. There are all these other complicated things going along, including other genomes, like in our mitochondria and so forth, and then other parts of the organism, like our microbiome.

1:06:22And all of these seem to me to be, you know, like you've already said, not non-Darwinian, but enhancements or embellishments of the idea that we're simply a list of base pairs handed down from generation to generation. Yeah, exactly. I think that's exactly, I think it's partly a love of simplicity, but I also think there are some other things maybe going on there. I mean, I mentioned, you know, in the first instance, in the later 19th, early 20th century, I think it had to do with making room for a more traditional theological vision of living things.

1:06:57You know, if the organism is passive, that leaves room for a designer god behind the scenes. But I also think, you know, I've been really struck by the degree to which neo-Darwinists of the middle decades of the 20th century, kind of from the inception of the modern synthesis. Julian Huxley, the English biologist, declared the modern synthesis in 1942. So if you look at sort of from those middle decades of the 20th century onward, the degree to which they were eugenicists.

1:07:28Actually, even going back before that, you can go back to R.A. Fisher, the sort of neticist, statistician, did foundational work in neo-Darwinist biology and Haldane. I mean, I'm just sort of naming people involved in this establishment of this neo-Darwinist paradigm. They were all eugenicists, pretty much without exception. And so that you have to sort of, you have to relinquish the idea that you had science and then science or science and, you know, miscarriages of science.

1:08:06It really wasn't the case. They were really the same.

1:08:10And I think there was a sort of eugenic logic built into the idea of this, of the passivity of living beings, including human beings. There was a kind of eugenic logic built into the deep structure of that idea that was, you know, attractive to these generations of kind of, what's the word? It's a very heroic model of science. You know, Julian Huxley says, we can become the general managers of evolution. And he coined the term transhumanism, which is a term apparently that Jeffrey Epstein really liked.

1:08:42Yeah, that's not going out of style. Transhumanism, and we can take hold. It's funny because there's sort of contradiction. You have this kind of passive model of what living things, including human beings, are. And yet they have the idea that they can seize hold of it and exert their own structure on it. And so, you know, I have a transcript of a conference that took place in London in 1962 where all of these major figures were present. And they were saying things like they were trying to figure out how to solve the problem.

1:09:16Fisher was very worried, although he wasn't he wasn't at the conference, but he had been very worried that poor people have more children than rich people. And he was assuming that poor people are genetically inferior. And so how can we solve that problem? And people had various ideas, like maybe you could offer a tax rebate to rich people for having more children or something like that, you know. And so people were discussing this kind of idea at the conference. And Francis Crick says, well, you know, it should be a simple matter for a government to put a sterilizing agent into the food supply.

1:09:48And then people would have to apply for a license to have children. And then they could give you an antidote, you know. And he was sort of it was sort of. By the way, yeah, casual. Sorry. It's just sort of, by the way, casual suggestion. Yeah. Yeah. People were joking about this. And, you know, so it was absolutely mainstream. And I think that Watson, James Watson, got in trouble very late in his life for saying all this kind of racist stuff out loud in a very ugly way. But interestingly, what he was saying was really not out of keeping with what utterly mainstream in that science through all those decades.

1:10:24And maybe, you know, I think in some ways even today. And so I guess what I'm suggesting is that the attraction to this reductive neo-Darwinist paradigm is not purely a love of simplicity. But I think it's a love of power and control also. It can be anyway. And that it's connected with a kind of eugenics, but also with an idea of kind of exerting control on the natural world. And so I'm hopeful that kind of the story of Lamarck and Lamarckism can kind of cast some historical perspective on the current state of evolutionary biology and maybe suggest kind of other ways of thinking about – well, already people are pursuing these other ways of thinking about organisms that are less about control and domination.

1:11:13Well, and I have the impression, and again, I'm certainly not an expert, so correct me, but these kinds of issues of evolution and how we shape who we are, etc., people have a lot of preexisting ideas that they then sort of pseudoscience-ize, right, into their scientific theorizing. And I think it happens in all different ways. Like, famously, there was Lysenkoism in the Soviet Union, which had a family connection to Lamarck somehow.

1:11:45Yeah, Lysenko. Okay, that's a really interesting episode. And that's, I think, something else. People think of giraffes. That's one association they have with Lamarck. And often people think of Lysenko, the other association they have. So he claimed to be a Lamarckian. In the 1940s, in the Soviet Union, Lysenko, the Soviet biologist, claimed that he could change the germination season of wheat by subjecting it to cold and moisture. And that was actually something that farmers did, and you can see do that.

1:12:18But he also claimed that it would be inherited in the next generation, which it wasn't. But that, again, not Lamarckism, really. That is more like Weissmann's chopping off the tails of mice, right? It's an exertion of— It's not the self doing the work. Right, exactly. It's an exertion from outside. Anyway, Lysenko claimed he could do this. Stalin embraced it. And it became very difficult to do genetic research in the Soviet Union.

1:12:48And one—actually, one Soviet geneticist, Vavilov, was imprisoned and died in prison. And so, I mean, it was a terrible episode. But what's interesting to me about that episode is that it was really ideological from both sides. So on the American, European, Western side, for example, Julian Huxley seized hold of this example, of the example of Lysenko, because this was a moment when he and other neo-Darwinists were very busily eradicating Marxism from Darwinism.

1:13:22And he seized hold of Lysenko, and he basically explained that the—he said that the Soviet communists couldn't accept genetics because they couldn't accept the reality of the genetic inequality of people. People are genetically unequal. And they were radical egalitarians, and so they couldn't accept that. And so, basically, he equated Lamarckism with Soviet communism. And so, in the West, it became very difficult to do research on Lamarckian inheritance or anything, you know, outside of the genome, also for ideological reasons.

1:13:57To say that it was ideological in the Soviet Union doesn't mean that it wasn't ideological in the West. No, exactly. All the sides. Everyone does it. Yeah. And Huxley also said—you know, this is part of his—he was eugenicist, as I mentioned, and he said that we have to exploit the reality of genetic inequality, and that the slogan should be—our slogan, he said, should be free but unequal. Right? That's a perfect encapsulation of the anti-Soviet—of the kind of Cold War ideology, I think. Some will be more free than others when all is said and done, typically, in that. Right, right. Okay, good. This has been a very, very wonderful journey through both the history and the biography and the science of it all.

1:14:32I have two questions to wind things up, and they're both pretty open-ended. So, one, you've already alluded to this one, but given the whole story, given Lamarck and Darwin and the ideological components and the theological components, what are the lessons that you draw for how science should be done? Like, is it good to be aware of the predilections we have for letting certain non-epistemic factors creep in to how we theorize and experiment?

1:15:02Oh, thank you for asking that. Actually, that's something very close to my heart. I think that—well, one thing is that I talk with students about this a lot. I think that science is an element of human culture, and it's ineradicable from the—you know, it's not separable from the rest of culture. So, interpretation is—that's—another thing is that interpretation goes all the way down, right? Everything we know is known by us from our perspective in a culture and in a situation, and our interpretation is inseparable from our knowledge of the world.

1:15:35So, rather than striving for a kind of view-from-nowhere objectivity, that's impossible. That can't happen, right? So, rather than striving for that or claiming to represent it and to speak ex-cathedra in the science or nature, right, instead of that, I think the thing to aspire to is kind of to be as self-conscious and transparent as possible about what our interpretation are and why. And that is a different thing from objectivity, but it is not—it's still a question of rigor.

1:16:07It's still a search for truth, but it is accepting the reality that interpretation goes all the way down and that that's not a bad thing. It's not a taint. It is just what it is to be a human trying to understand the world. And then another thing I would say is that up through the end of the 19th century, the sciences were not separate from, as you've just been pointing out, the sciences were not separate from literature or art or aesthetics, other elements of the culture. It was all philosophy. It was all kind of mixed together.

1:16:37And, you know, I was mentioning that Darwin was a brilliant writer, and he thought about his science, I think, in very literal terms and philosophy. And Lamarck also, you know, was a philosopher and a musician, and, you know, he was thinking about in this kind of holistic way. And then there was this moment of divorce at the end of the kind of, I would say, 25 years on either side of the turn of the 19th and 20th century. There's a radical divorce between science and all other forms of knowing.

1:17:10And that's a whole story that I want to tell in another book, I think. The reasons for that divorce, I think, were interesting and political and complicated. But I think it's—on some level, it is impoverishing on both sides, you know. And I think that if we return to a more integral way of approaching the world in which different—if science is not kind of isolated, you know, existing in splendid isolation on its own, apart from everything else, but is more connected with other areas, that that would be a much better thing.

1:17:45So teaching the history of science at a place like Stanford, I am kind of the soul of togetherness between both sides of campus, the sciences and the other areas. And I've been really excited to be a part of the conversations with these people in the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, who, as I mentioned, they're interested in culture. Like, they talk about whales as having a culture, deciding on what song they're going to sing and how they're going to hunt, and doing that, handing that down to their offspring, these practices. That's a form of culture. And so the reason they were interested in talking with philosophers and scientists, they figured, well, these are people who study culture.

1:18:19So, you know, that more integral approach, I think, is maybe already happening, and it's a very exciting thing. Well, this is part of the motivation for us trying to revive the idea of natural philosophy, you know, bringing the natural sciences back into more conversation with the philosophical side of things. Good. Then the final question, that question was, what are the lessons for how science is done? The final question is, what are the lessons for taking care of the world? Do you do, at the end of the book, sort of, you know, say, okay, if we're remembering or being reminded of the fact that we are agents and the changes is created by within us as well as external factors, does that have any implications for our place as denizens of planet Earth?

1:19:04Yeah, that's a wonderful question. Let me see if I can do justice with that question. I mean, one thing I think is that it's important to think in terms of, in participatory terms, you know, we are acting from within the natural world and not from outside of it and imposing upon it. And there's a French, he calls himself an environmental philosopher named Baptiste Morisot. He's at the University of Aix-Marseille, I think. He's written several books about this question of how, you know, his argument is that environmentalists often, you know, people who are really very concerned about conservation and preservation, they nevertheless continue to think in terms of exerting an order, you know, like, I don't know, eradicating invasive species and maintaining an ecology in the exact way that they feel that it should be maintained and so forth.

1:19:54And that this mindset is still participating in the older destructive way of thinking about things. And that instead we should be regarding ourselves, like, for example, E.O. Wilson had this, I think, crazy idea, half Earth idea that humans should occupy only half the planet and leave the other half wild as though humans could be extricated from the rest of the natural world. And it's not the case. We're animals. You know, this is what Lamarck and Darwin have shown us. We are animals in the animal world.

1:20:25We are part of nature. And so I think that somehow we need to imagine our environmentalist conservation efforts sort of as being from within the natural world and not from without. I think that's a perfect motto to end on. It gives us absolutely something to think about in a way to move forward. So, Jessica Riskin, thanks very much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you so much. It's really been fun. It's been wonderful. Thank you.

1:20:58Thank you. Thank you.