Happy 270th birthday, Jean-Baptiste!

Well maybe he inherited his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics from his parents' beliefs in inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

OK, it doesn't make me think either.

Glen Davidson

Cultural inheritance of ideas often is described as following "Lamarckian inheritance". It does have inheritance of acquired characters. It is less clear whether it has Lamarck's supposed mechanism of "use and disuse", or his inherent complexifying force. Except maybe in software projects.

Please tell me that he achieved the title of "Count"...

scienceavenger said: Please tell me that he achieved the title of "Count"...

I'm missing the pun.

Lamarck was of the impoverished nobility, whose only route to eminence was through the army, which is where he started. He was only a Chevalier and remained at that low rank.

Buffon inherited great wealth and was the Comte de Buffon. Cuvier was made a Baron although he was born of the bourgeoisie.

His idea about a complexifying force does not seem to be mentioned in textbooks nearly as often as the idea about inheritance of acquired characters. I find this puzzling, since the c.f. idea was more uniquely his, as I understand it, and it was pretty nifty. It at once explained why there are 'lower' and 'higher' forms today, and it explained the glimmer of evidence of succession in the fossil record -- that the oldest rocks only had invertebrates, then later rocks included fish, strange reptiles, and finally mammals.

Mark Sturtevant said: His idea about a complexifying force does not seem to be mentioned in textbooks nearly as often as the idea about inheritance of acquired characters. I find this puzzling, since the c.f. idea was more uniquely his, as I understand it, and it was pretty nifty. It at once explained why there are 'lower' and 'higher' forms today, and it explained the glimmer of evidence of succession in the fossil record -- that the oldest rocks only had invertebrates, then later rocks included fish, strange reptiles, and finally mammals.

Mark Sturtevant said: His idea about a complexifying force does not seem to be mentioned in textbooks nearly as often as the idea about inheritance of acquired characters. I find this puzzling, since the c.f. idea was more uniquely his, as I understand it, and it was pretty nifty. It at once explained why there are 'lower' and 'higher' forms today, and it explained the glimmer of evidence of succession in the fossil record -- that the oldest rocks only had invertebrates, then later rocks included fish, strange reptiles, and finally mammals.

TomS said: ... However, the extinction of the dinosaurs presented a difficulty with the complexifying force in the early 19th century. The CF was failing in its job if these huge complex creatures passed away, while so many simple little animals are still with us.

Joe Felsenstein said: Strangely enough, Lamarck did not believe in extinction. In his tree, if a species went extinct, the forms below it would evolve and fill in the gap in the tree -- thus evolving the extinct species again!

Lamarck did not believe all species shared a common ancestor. While he believed in evolution, it was a version that would seem quite alien to any living evolutionary biologist. New simple species constantly appeared and they evolved upward in his version. It was not a tree but a bunch of parallel line segments. This was nonsense. One of Darwin's big conceptual advances was to replace those lines with trees.

Joe Felsenstein said: I'm missing the pun.

Childermass said: Lamarck did not believe all species shared a common ancestor. While he believed in evolution, it was a version that would seem quite alien to any living evolutionary biologist. New simple species constantly appeared and they evolved upward in his version. It was not a tree but a bunch of parallel line segments. This was nonsense. One of Darwin's big conceptual advances was to replace those lines with trees.

harold said: What's actually nonsensical is to anachronistically judge early scientists for not being aware of later advances that their work paved the way for.

TomS said:

harold said: What's actually nonsensical is to anachronistically judge early scientists for not being aware of later advances that their work paved the way for.

See the Wikipedia article Whiggish historiography#In the history of science

Harold, I do not subscribe to the Whig Interpretation of History. I even read Butterfield's book, which gave the name to that view, over two decades ago though admittedly I don't remember much of the content.

Lamarck was absurd not merely absurd from our point of view (and some seem to think he was some sort of proto-Darwin), but from the standards of his own time.

As has been pointed out the did not believe in extinction. The evidence was already in for that by his time. His scheme was a conceptual mess especially when it tried to deal with the fossil record. That record does not show any sort of progression to us. The creationist George Cuvier make short work of Lamarck's views. That we today know that Cuvier's own views are incorrect will not change that. Other than keeping the idea that species could change in time out there, I would not consider his work to have been a necessary stepping stone for Darwin to do what he did.

Meanwhile the article is still wrong about Lamarck being an advocate of common descent. He was not. The only reason to just assume that he was, is the idea that he was some sort of less-perfect Darwin which is a bit Whiggish itself.

So it should not be called “Lamarckian inheritance”.

Happy birthday to Lamarck, not a crackpot, not a quack, but a great evolutionary biologist.

Correction: I think now that Buffon died without seeing Lamarck's evolutionary ideas, so it shouldn't surprise (or mean anything) that he didn't accept Larmarckian evolution.

Glen Davidson

https://me.yahoo.com/a/JxVN0eQFqtmgoY7wC1cZM44ET_iAanxHQmLgYgX_Zhn8#57cad said:

So it should not be called “Lamarckian inheritance”.

Why not? It's associated with him, even though it was hardly unique to him, being shared with Darwin, for instance. Darwin didn't invent the idea of natural selection, but is there any reason we should not call natural selection "Darwinian"? Glen Davidson

Lamarck was a major contributor to evolutionary biology -- his views were influential throughout the 1800s and continued to be a major competitor to Darwin's and Wallace's views until the time of the Modern Synthesis in the 1920s and 1930s. During the period after 1859 most biologists came to accept common descent, but many did not accept natural selection as a major evolutionary mechanism. Many of them were one form or another of Lamarckian. See Peter Bowler's excellent history of this debate The Eclipse of Darwinism.

The reason not to name inheritance of acquired characters after him is to avoid the impression that this was something that he invented and tried to foist on people. If you asked an average person in his era whether this idea was Lamarck's, they would say "La-who? I've always known that!" Lamarck's idea was more specific -- the effects of use and disuse as one type of inheritance of acquired characters. The distinction was important because use-and-disuse is capable, in principle, of explaining why the change is actually adaptive.

The somewhat mysterious nature of Lamarck's forces such as the inherent complexifying force was common in scientific theories in the early 1800s. By later in the 1800s they appeared embarrassingly mystical and were quietly de-emphasized in "Lamarckian" theories.

Stigler's law of eponymy

"No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

TomS said: Stigler's law of eponymy "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

Joe Felsenstein said:

TomS said: Stigler's law of eponymy "No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer."

Who originally discovered that law?

There were a lot of people who did not believe in extinction. For one thing, it would represent a flaw in God’s creation. (Today’s creationists somehow or other have made their peace with that. Explain that!)

— TomS

TomS said: "Stigler named the sociologist Robert K. Merton as the discoverer"

Frank J said:

There were a lot of people who did not believe in extinction. For one thing, it would represent a flaw in God’s creation. (Today’s creationists somehow or other have made their peace with that. Explain that!)

— TomS

As you know, most of "today's creationists" are clueless people on the street who haven't given 5 minutes' thought to anything they repeat. Unfortunately so are most people who claim to have no problem with evolution but don't know an atom from a molecule, but I digress. If you mean that tiny subset of "creationists" that I prefer to call "anti-evolution activists," they will keep or toss whatever anti-evolution arguments they think will sell, even if they contradict other anti-evolution arguments. Because they know that their target audience will either not notice, or, in the case of many critics who know better, take the bait and argue on their terms instead of asking the hard questions, as you and I do. As for extinction, if one who believes in a Creator does not consider the death of an individual as a "flaw," why would he consider multiple, simultaneous deaths one? Besides, the subset of believers that takes the Flood story literally has no problem with that mass extinction.

TomS said: It's hard to understand what they're going to accept and what they're going to find objectionable. Are the dinosaurs saved from the Flood, only to go extinct later, or are the dinosaurs still with us? For that matter, were there dinosaurs, or are they just a figment of "historical science"? Why is it OK for there to be naturalistic accounts of birth and death, but not for speciation and extinction; or OK for extinction, too, but not speciation; or OK for speciation but not for "baraminogenesis"? The Bible, and I don't think that we can get much dissent on this, says nothing about extinction. (But then, the Bible doesn't say anything about the taxonomy of microbes or their genesis.)

david.starling.macmillan said:

TomS said: It's hard to understand what they're going to accept and what they're going to find objectionable. Are the dinosaurs saved from the Flood, only to go extinct later, or are the dinosaurs still with us? For that matter, were there dinosaurs, or are they just a figment of "historical science"? Why is it OK for there to be naturalistic accounts of birth and death, but not for speciation and extinction; or OK for extinction, too, but not speciation; or OK for speciation but not for "baraminogenesis"? The Bible, and I don't think that we can get much dissent on this, says nothing about extinction. (But then, the Bible doesn't say anything about the taxonomy of microbes or their genesis.)

For the average "creationist" on the street...eh, who knows. For the activist creationists, they have all the explanations for everything. Dinosaurs were saved, but most of the big ones died out eventually from climate change, even though some species could have theoretically survived to this day. Speciation and extinction can happen, but genetic "information" can't "increase", so any given set of species must be groupable into original information-apex baramins.

But I have the vice of curiosity.

Lamarck was absurd not merely absurd from our point of view (and some seem to think he was some sort of proto-Darwin), but from the standards of his own time.

harold said: This leap is hard enough for people to make when there is no biasing factor, and in the case of Lamarck, a biasing factor has been at play for two centuries.

Joe Felsenstein said: Lamarck was a major contributor to evolutionary biology -- his views were influential throughout the 1800s and continued to be a major competitor to Darwin's and Wallace's views until the time of the Modern Synthesis in the 1920s and 1930s.

The reason not to name inheritance of acquired characters after him is to avoid the impression that this was something that he invented and tried to foist on people. If you asked an average person in his era whether this idea was Lamarck's, they would say "La-who? I've always known that!" Lamarck's idea was more specific -- the effects of use and disuse as one type of inheritance of acquired characters. The distinction was important because use-and-disuse is capable, in principle, of explaining why the change is actually adaptive.

Joe definitely has a valid point. I’ve argued Behe, Meyer, and Dembski not real Creationists based on acceptance (not possibility) of species mutability. Of course such argument pleases the aforementioned. They don’t want to be viewed as Creationists; seems they are ashamed of the Creator, the Father of their alleged Savior. I’m willing to retract my identification of Lamarck to have been a Creationist for the time being. Obviously, all things considered, the issue at hand is complex, requiring more thought before conclusions can be made.

Joe Felsenstein said: Ray, I'm frustrated too. Yes, we've been around and around on this one. I thought we made a little progress last time (see below) but here you come with the same old arguments.

1. What Bowler said: You can check out a copy from some library. Read Chapter 4. It's entitled "Lamarckism" and is 49 pages long. That's nearly a quarter of his book, which is about evolutionary thinking after 1860 that rejected the importance of natural selection. Its sections include "The Origin of Lamarckism", "Lamarckism, 1890-1914" and "Lamarckism after the war" (he means after 1918).

2. Your often-used phrase "as we understand the concept since the rise of Darwinism" is, as I have said several times before, a ridiculous equivocation. By that standard Newton did not have any laws of motion "as we understand the concept since the work of Einstein".

3. Last year we had these arguments out. You must have forgotten what happened. After I made arguments for Lamarck having had an evolutionary theory and not having been a creationist, you wrote (here):

Joe definitely has a valid point. I’ve argued Behe, Meyer, and Dembski not real Creationists based on acceptance (not possibility) of species mutability. Of course such argument pleases the aforementioned. They don’t want to be viewed as Creationists; seems they are ashamed of the Creator, the Father of their alleged Savior. I’m willing to retract my identification of Lamarck to have been a Creationist for the time being. Obviously, all things considered, the issue at hand is complex, requiring more thought before conclusions can be made.

But here you are again with the same old Clifford quote, the same old absurd argument "as we understand the concept since", and a refusal to notice what you said last year. For a while I thought you were willing to admit being wrong when you were shown to be wrong.

Conclusion adopted hitherto: Nature (or her Author) in creating animals, foresaw all the possible kinds of environment in which they would have to live, and endowed each species with a fixed organisation and with a definite and invariable shape, which compel each species to live in the places and climates where we actually find them, and there to maintain the habits which we know in them. My individual conclusion: Nature has produced all the species of animals in succession, beginning with the most imperfect or simplest, and ending her work with the most perfect, so as to create a gradually increasing complexity in their organisation;

Joe Felsenstein said: Ray, I reject the idea that Lamarck is not envisioning evolution because he does not invoke "undirected" processes. Directed or undirected, it is evolution. Just as you are too picky about who is a creationist, you are too picky about who is an evolutionist. You have Lamarck a creationist because, in among his use-and-disuse mechanism he has a force filling in gaps in the tree of life, and you believe that this is by Divine Intervention. Behe et al. do the same, but you refuse to count Behe as a creationist! As to whether Lamarck envisaged a divine intervention, there is a passage in Philosophie Zoologique that is telling. Lamarck is comparing the previous theory with his own.

Conclusion adopted hitherto: Nature (or her Author) in creating animals, foresaw all the possible kinds of environment in which they would have to live, and endowed each species with a fixed organisation and with a definite and invariable shape, which compel each species to live in the places and climates where we actually find them, and there to maintain the habits which we know in them. My individual conclusion: Nature has produced all the species of animals in succession, beginning with the most imperfect or simplest, and ending her work with the most perfect, so as to create a gradually increasing complexity in their organisation;

Notice that the "conclusion adopted hitherto" (i.e., by everyone else) involves actions by "Nature (or her Author)", but that when Lamarck makes his "individual conclusion" only Nature is acting. I think that Lamarck was at most a deist, and was not a theist, hence certainly not a creationist.

OK, fine with me.