Denis Noble, University of Oxford, UK

https://doi.org/10.36866/pn.111.6

Eight years ago(1) Denis Noble dreamt that he was the Editor of PN and had received a letter from Lamarck, which he imagined he had translated into English for readers of PN. Much has happened since then so it is not surprising that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has appeared again in Denis’ dreams over the New Year 2018.

Jardin des Plantes, Paris, le 1 janvier 2018.
Monsieur le Rédacteur,
Puis-je profiter de votre Société la plus distinguée encore une fois…

May I use your most highly distinguished Society, and its eminent Physiology News magazine, once again to present my reflections on what has transpired since I last wrote a letter to you?

First I welcome the special issue of your Journal of Physiology devoted to the integration of evolutionary biology with physiological science.(2) I did not call myself a physiologist. After all, I had only just coined the word biology. But if your Society had existed in 1809 I would have loved to be a member, as was your great Charles Darwin at your foundation in 1876. We didn’t call evolution ‘evolution’ in my day. ‘Evolution’ was the development of the embryo, itself a physiological (functional) process. Evolution in your modern sense was called transformationism. Charles Darwin praised me for championing the transformation of species against creationists like Cuvier.(3)

You rightly used the subtitle physiology returns to centre stage in the special issue. You physiologists understand the nature of function in biology. It is what distinguishes biology from physics. That is why I regarded biology as a separate discipline and introduced its name, biologie in my language, to emphasise that point. I also said that living organisms have innate tendencies, what I called ‘le pouvoir de la vie’. Sadly, that phrase earned me the misunderstanding that I was a kind of vitalist. That is far from true. I vigorously opposed the vitalism of Bichat and other vitalist physiologists of my day.(4)

I note with pleasant surprise that your Society’s bold initiative was followed two years later by your national academy, The Royal Society, which, in collaboration with The British Academy, organised a meeting on New Trends in Evolutionary Biology, now also published in a special journal issue.(5) Pleasant for me because after the withering attack on me at my funeral by Georges Cuvier(6) I imagined that my reputation could never recover.

Those two magnificent volumes of British journals have done much to reassure me that not all is lost. So, why am I writing this letter to you? There are still two other matters on which I would like to correct the historical record. These are the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the famous ‘tree of life’. When I am referred to at all in your evolutionary biology textbooks, I am usually a figure of ridicule. It is not widely understood that Charles Darwin agreed with the inheritance of acquired characteristics and he even formulated a theory for how it could work. He called the objects of transmission from the soma to the germline ‘gemmules’.(7) I had a similar idea. I called them ‘subtle fluids’. The modern discovery of transmission of RNAs through the germline could surely achieve what he and I postulated.(8)

This is beginning to be understood. But there is something else highly important on which Darwin and I agreed. This is his famous ‘tree of life’: the branching network of development of new species from previous ones. By contrast, I am represented as believing that evolution was a single ‘ladder of life’, from simple to more complex, following my idea of le pouvoir de la vie.

It is true that this was my view when I wrote Philosophie Zoologique in 1809.9 But as I further studied worms (remember that I was Professor of worms and insects at the Jardin des Plantes) I came to the clear conclusion that a single ladder could not be true. To use my terminology, the ‘internal’ worms (such as tapeworms) and ‘external’ worms (such as earthworms) could not possibly be fitted into a single ladder of life. In my 1815 Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres,(10) and again in my last book, Système analytique des connaissances positives de l’homme, published in 1820, I corrected this mistake.(11) Your great, and sadly lamented, evolutionary biologist Stephen J Gould clearly outlined the history of my ideas. After doing so, he concluded:

‘how can we view his [Lamarck’s] slow acknowledgement of logical error, and his willingness to construct an entirely new and contrary explanation, as anything other than a heroic act, worthy of our greatest admiration and identifying Lamarck as one of the finest intellects in the history of biology?’(12)

Veuillez accepter, cher Monsieur le rédacteur, l’expression de mes sentiments les plus distingués,
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de la Marck

References

1. Notes by Denis Noble (2010). Physiology News 78, 31.
2. The integration of evolutionary biology with physiological science(2014). Journal of Physiology
   592, 2237–2438.
3. Preface to the fourth edition of The Origin of Species (1866).
4. This is very clearly explained in André Pichot’s introduction to a reprint of Philosophie
   Zoologique. Flammarion, Paris, 1994. ‘Philosophy’ was synonymous with ‘science’ in Lamarck’s time.
   Hence the journal title ‘Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society’.
5. New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and social science perspectives
   (2017). Interface Focus 7(5).
6. http://www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/cuvier/cuvier_on_lamarck.htm
7. This theory is formulated in Darwin’s later book: The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication (1868).
8. Spadafora (2017), Sperm-mediated transgenerational,inheritance. Frontiers in Microbiology 8, 2401.
   DOI: 10.3389/fmicb.2017.02401. eCollection 2017. Spadafora concludes: ‘On the whole, this phenomenon is compatible with a Lamarckian-type view and closely resembles Darwinian pangenesis.’
9. It is true that the bulk of Philosophie Zoologique fits the view he is expressing, but he made a
   late addition at the very end of the book that already contains the essence of the tree viewpoint. In the Flammarion
   reprint of Philosophie Zoologique there is a diagram on page 649 that must rank, as Gould says, as
   the first construction of an evolutionary tree. Lamarck even writes ‘In its production of the
   different animals, nature has not fashioned a single and simple series.’ (Gould’s translation). See
   Fig. 1, left. Darwin’s first tree sketch is shown on the right. I doubt whether Darwin knew of
   Lamarck’s conversion to branching trees.
10. ‘In its production of the different animals, nature has not fashioned a single and simple series’ (Gould’s translation)
11. Lamarck JB (1820). Système analytique des connaissances positives de l’homme. pp. 134–148. Lamarck repeatedly uses the word ‘branch’: ‘The polyps… seem to divide into three branches’; ‘… the crustaceans come from another branch separate from the arachnids’; ‘… the reptiles … another branch seems to lead to the lizards, towards the mammals’ (my translations).
12. Gould, SJ (2000). A tree grows in Paris: Lamarck’s division of worms and revision of nature. In The lying stones of Marrakech. Harmony Books, Chapter 6.I am very grateful to Jonathan Bard, (author of The Principles of Evolution, Systems, Species and the History of Life, Garland Science, 2016) for drawing my attention to Gould’s scholarly and insightful essay. In a review of Bard’s valuable book I wrote ‘The book I needed as a researcher.’ I still think that.