Speaker 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy. Today is Monday,
July sixth, twenty twenty six and I'm the host of
the show, Doctor Kara Santa Maria, and as always, I
want to thank those of you who make Talk Nerdy possible.
This week's talk patrons include Chuck Blell, David J. E. Smith,
Daniel Lang, Will Defrain, David Compton, Brian Holden, Gabo, Jay
Ulrica Hagmann, Pasqually Gelati, Rika Maharaj and Joe Wilkinson. If
you're interested in pledging your support on an episodic basis,
all you've got to do is visit patreon dot com
slash talk Nerdy to learn more. All right, let's get
into it. This week I had the opportunity to speak
with doctor Jessica Riskin. She's a professor of history at
Stanford University, where she teaches both modern European history and
the history of science. She's written for a ton of outlets,
and she's a newly elected member of the American Philosophical Society.
She has a new book out and it's called The
Power of Life. The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary
Science of Jean Baptiste Lamarck. So without any further ado,
here she is doctor Jessica Riskin. Well, Jessica, thank you
so much for joining me today.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I'm really happy to get to
talk about my book with you.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and I love that we are connecting from across
the globe. You're in Paris right now, but you're usually
up in Stanford.
Speaker 2: Right, that's right, that's right. Well, I teach at Stanford.
I live in Berkeley, California.
Speaker 1: You know, Jerkley. Oh yeah, I love Berkeley. Yeah, so
we are both West Coasters. I'm down in southern California.
I'm in Los Angeles, but a little bit more of
a time zone difference today. So A, I'm very appreciative
of you kind of bending your schedule for us, and
B you know, sometimes when we connect from so very
far away, there are like big delays, but I feel
like our connection is very clean today, So I'm appreciative
of that as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so far, so good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So I have to ask what time is it
in Paris right now? It's first thing in the morning
here in La.
Speaker 2: Yes, I know. I should thank you for being willing
to meet so early over here. It's very civilized. Five
forty PM. It's not a very civilized temperature. I will
say it is incredibly hot in Paris. It is a
huge heat wave that just is sitting over the city
and refuses to budge. And every day, you know, they
extend how long they expect this heat wave to go on.
Speaker 1: And there was a there. I mean, this is so
not relevant for the show, but there was a heat
advisory in La a few days ago and I looked
and it was like, it will be eighty five degrees
and I was like, oh no, Like what ridiculous heat advisor.
But my assumption is that in the high desert it
was probably pretty brutal. So yes, come back to us soon,
but don't really, because I love Paris and I'm very
jealous that you're there. So I'm so excited to talk
about your newest book, and this is gosh, is it
your third or have you written even more?
Speaker 2: It is my third, yeah, my third kind of single
author book. I've done edited volumes and kind of collective books,
but this is my third one that I just wrote
by myself, and it takes centuries for me to write
a book. So that's why I'm especially happy to get
to talk to you about it is that it takes
so long and it's pretty solitary, and then when I
finished with that, I'm just really eager to talk to
people about it and be out in the world. You know.
That's the fun part that.
Speaker 1: Gives me such joy. And like, I love that you're
like it takes centuries to write a book, because you're
also writing about things that were centuries ago. Before we
get into the actual book itself, I'd love to learn
a little bit more about you and about your work.
So you are a history and do you specifically focus
on the history of science?
Speaker 2: I do, Yeah, I do. So, you know, my position
is in I teach in the history department at Stafford
and it's just a regular old mainstream history department with
historians of different areas and different emphasies and so, but
my area of expertise is the history of science, and
I have a background in French history and sort of
European history broadly speaking seventeenth to nineteenth century, and so.
Speaker 1: You kind of combine those areas And do you really
enjoy focusing on this science which is such an interesting
time for science, but the science in those regions at
that time where gosh, there was so many discoveries going on.
There were so many people saying, no, you're wrong, there's
no way it could possibly not be the way we've
always thought it was. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think partly so I've always been interested in
science kind of how shall I put it, kind of
on a meta level, like why is this how people
understand the world, And how did it come to be
the way people understand the world, and how has it
looked in the past and so on, And I think
that I was drawn to this, you know, seventeenth eighteenth,
early nineteenth century because people were not specialized, you know,
in that period, so people really did work in many areas.
They worked in many areas of natural science, but also
in humanities and literature and art, and so, you know,
I really love that lack of specialization and kind of
broad philosophical outlook on everything. I think that's what drew
me to that period. I have to say I love
that too.
Speaker 1: As as a fellow holder of a PhD, I think
that it has lost its Maybe it hasn't lost its
meaning as much, but for many people who have PhDs
in the modern era, a Doctor of Philosophy degree, they
get very little philosophy training and so, you know, I'm
a psychologist. I think in some ways I'm lucky because
I'm still in a field that is very much an
intersection of science and humanities. But a lot of people
who have hard science degrees don't even take a history
and systems course. They don't even grapple that much with
how we know what we know. And it breaks my
heart because I think that there was a historical era
going back, you know, pretty much forever where in order
to be a quote scientist, you had to be a philosopher,
you had to be a I don't know, like a sociologist.
You had to be all of these different things.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, you know, absolutely, and I think just what you
just said, you know that many scientists are not trained
in the histories of their disciplines and what that means,
you know, that's I think that's sort of impoverishing for
them because they don't have a sense of sort of
how the questions that they're asking, how did those get
to be the questions they're asking. How did the assumptions
that they're making to be the assumptions, you know, And
so they can't really I think, you know, one of
the most valuable things about the history of science is
for the present, maybe that it can kind of reopen
perspectives and questions that have gone by the wayside, and
certainly in the history of evolutionary theory, that's something that
I hope you know that I've been really interested in
kind of ways of thinking about life and about the
evolution of life that were kind of marginalized in the
history of evolutionary theory. And one of the most exciting
things about working in that area for me has been
that I've gotten to no biologists who are actually interested
in the history of their field and in kind of
trying to reopen some questions that have gotten very narrowed
and closed down. So yeah, I think the sciences need
the humanities, and vice versa. We need each other. We're
operating in two specialized and intellectual world and we need
each other across those lids.
Speaker 1: I agree wholeheartedly, and I feel like one of the
lucky things about my own education is that I was
able to do way back, way back when I did
my undergraduate degree because I took a long time off.
I worked as a journalist before I went back to school,
but early on I did an undergrad in psychology with
a philosophy minor, and then I did my masters in neurobiology.
So I did three wildly different fields, but they're really
not that different. They all play off of each other.
But it took a lot of navigating on my part
because they were all in different departments and they all
had different you know, advisors and major professors. But I
loved some of the philosophy courses I took early on,
you know, philosophy of natural sciences, philosophy of psychology in
the mind, learning about constructivism, all of these things that
I think not just applied to my work as a
and because I'm a clinical i'm practicing psychologist, but not
just to that work. My work is a human being.
How do we know what we know? Is very important
for getting I think unstuck in the dogma. It's very
easy to go, oh, that's just the way it is.
I take that for granted because that's what I was taught,
and now so often we're learning maybe that doesn't have
to be the way that it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wonder if psycho psychology might be another one
of those fields like history, that draws people who are
trying to find a way to not be too specialized
because anything kind of connecting with human experience seems to
me as fair game for a psychologist and the same
thing for a historian, you know. And there are fields
I think that attract people who want to think integrally
rather than in a specialized way. And my daughter is
interested in languages. She's studying to be a linguist, and
she likes that partly, I think because language pretty much
gets you a passport to any subject, so.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and you can always become specialized later. Like now
I work. I'm very specific. I'm like an existentially oriented
psychologist in a cancer center, you know. I have a
very specific focus on life, limiting disease, end of life.
But to get there, there was so much philosophy. There
was so and of course I think it lends itself right,
because what are we grappling with at the end of
our lives or when we get very sick? These big
picture questions. I love talking about these big picture questions.
And I think that's what drew me to your book
and having you on the podcast, was the very question
of life of how how did we get to where
we are? How are all of the different forms right,
all of the different morphologies, the specific species that are
on the planet right now, how did they get to
be where they were? And I think we take for
granted a very narrow Darwinian perspective now, which is most
people I think don't even understand fully and there's so
many things we're going to get you into with that.
But I think and it's also very easy for us
to look back at somebody like and sort of be like, oh,
that's laughable. But I'm so excited to talk about all
of the nuance here. So let's let's back up a
little bit, and maybe where do you think we should start? Like,
who was Jean Baptiste La Mark?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was thinking maybe this is a good moment
to introduce my protagonist. So he was Jean Baptiste la Mark.
He was the guy. Well, I'll start by saying he
coined the word biology in eighteen oh two. He invented
that word wow, and he invented it to name a
science that didn't yet exist.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: He thought that there should be a science of all
living things and only living things. And in the world,
you know, as it existed. Then there were larger sciences
like natural history, which included inanimate things as well as
animate things, and there were more specialized sciences like like
you know, physiology or botany or zoology, but there was
no science of life. And he thought there should be
a science of life, so he coined that word biology.
And then in eighteen oh non he published his big,
you know, magnum opus called The Zoological Philosophy, in which
he introduced the first theory of evolution, which was at
the center of his new science of biology. And so
the poor guy like he, I think the reason many
of us think of him as, you know, kind of
a laughingstock is that we were taught to think of
him that way. I mean, most biology textbooks and biology
courses up until today represent him as having been kind
of all wrong about Basically, what he said was that
living beings transformed themselves in response to their environments in
teeny teeny tiny little ways. But then those changes are
inherited and they're added if you add them together from
generations to generation, they they produce big changes. And the
example everyone always turns to. Of course, probably many of
our listeners are already have giraffes in mind, because people
always think of what he said about giraffe. It's like
one little paragraph in all of his voluminous, many many writings,
but he did have this or maybe two little paragraphs
about giraffes in which he said, the giraffes, by stretching
their necks to reach high up leaves in the trees,
they elongate their necks a tiny bit, and then they
pass that on and it gets added up over generations
to make the giraffes long neck. And so you know, biologists,
you know, professors and textbooks and things even today tend
to kind of represent that as a totally crazy idea
and all wrong. And I could talk more about that,
but anyway, I was fully interested in kind of the
whole of his work and the whole of his ideas
and how they kind of shaped biology both from within
and then also, you know, when they were banished, how
they kind of continued to act from outside of mainstream
science and now they're returning to mainstream science. So it's
really an interesting story for historian to trace.
Speaker 1: You know, when we think about this question of like evolution,
sort of how how did the giraffe become the giraffe
that we know? Now? How did we you know, become
who we are as a species? Now, Lamark can't have
been the first person to have grappled with that right
like he had his very specific theory. But this must
be a question that goes back to ancient philosophy. No sure.
Speaker 2: So he was working though, in a time when the
kind of established dominant theory was the theory of special creation.
Basically a rational designer God had made every living thing specially,
designing it for its place in the natural world, and
so you could even the argument was, you could even
demonstrate the existence of this God by the perfection of
you know, living things, everyone suited to its environments, to
its special place in the world. That shows you and
the famous example of the argument from design was written
by a man named William Paley in eighteen oh two,
the same year that Lamark published I'm Sorry, the same
year that he yet he published the word biology for
the first time. William Paley gave the example which became
quite famous, of you know, if you're what he says.
If I were walking across a heath and my foot
hit a rock and someone asked me how did that
rock come to be there? I could say, well, I
don't know, maybe it's been there forever. But if my
foot hit a watch, I couldn't say that a watch
is such an intricate, complex mechanism. Obviously there has to
have been a watchmaker.
Speaker 1: Uh oh, watchmaker. Here we are. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that was the argument from design. And well, I'll
come to Dawkins. We can talk about Dawkins, because I
think that a lot of that argument from design has
been transported into not Darwin's version of evolutionary theory, but
the neo Darwinist theory that came after Darwin's death incorporated
a lot of that earlier kind of natural theology argument
from design. Anyhow, Lamark was confront a world in which
that was the dominant way of thinking about why living
beings had the structures that they had, That they've been
designed that way by their creator, and they remained how
they'd been designed, you know, fixed their forms were fixed
that way. And people had begun, just in recent decades
to suggest more developmental ideas, but not in any systematic way.
So Lamark was really the first to develop. He was
very radical and revolutionary. He basically usurped God's monopoly on
creation and he reassigned it to living beings, and he
worked out a whole theory of how that you know,
how living beings are the real creators, you know.
Speaker 1: It's what's interesting to me is this question. I think
a lot of times when we talk about this early
evolutionary theory, we will couch it in terms of design, creation,
all of those things, and we speak, gosh, I'm trying
to figure out even how to put my words here, well,
speak in terms of sort of the evidence or the
description that these individuals developed along their work, you know,
throughout their work. But it seems to me like we
cannot decouple the actual science from the person's personal religious
philosophy or theology. And it's easy for me to say,
living in twenty twenty six, looking back as somebody who
was like raised Mormon and who is now like an
abject atheist, you know that it has no religion in
my life at all, to look back and go like,
you know, people at the time like everybody was religious
or were they all was like lamark as secret atheist
or like Darwin. I know, he grappled his whole life
with that question, and he was like, oh, my whole
you know, I'm kind of heretical to my people. But
at the same time, like I think there was a
lot of like self turmoil right as Darwin was grappling.
What was Lamarck's personal philosophy?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, so well, I think that the kind of
world that Lamark entered into when he he you know,
at a certain point he kind of moved into the
Garden of Plants, the big botanical garden in central Paris,
and he lived and worked there throughout his career, and
in fact, during the Revolution there was a natural history
museum that was established in the garden where he was associated.
He had the very wonderful title of Professor of Insects
and worms that museum. And in that that kind of
world people had been much less devout, you know, the French.
The middle of the eighteenth century in France was a
period in which people really were challenging traditional religious accounts
of the world and trying to develop naturalist ones. And
so Lamark had the advantage of kind of coming toward
the end of this period of kind of ideas, natural
philosophical ideas in which people were trying to understand the
world without recourse to a supernatural designer. But I should
also say though, that his arch nemesis was a man
named Josh Cuvier, a colleague in the in the Natural
History Museum, also a zoologist at a paleontologist, and Cuvier
was a devout Lutheran who believed in the doctrine of
special creation. He was absolutely opposed to Lamarck's idea of
transformation of living forms, and Cuvier basically believed that he
actually did very important work to establish the reality of extinctions.
Cuvier did, but he thought that extinctions were the result
of big, big disasters like floods or fires, like in
the like in the Bible, like in the Book of Genesis,
and then they would be followed by new acts of creation.
So Lamark was confronting that that religious picture, and Cuvier
was very I would say, very important and undermining Lamarck
and his reputation in the long term.
Speaker 1: It's so funny because I think about, like today, I
can't help but come back to, like right now, in
the all of the socio political debates that can you know,
rage even til now, even with all of the evidence
that we have, because I think sometimes our own perspective
of the evidence, our own sort of construction of reality,
is based very often or at least I don't know,
it's kind of steeped in our personal obligation to our
religious perspective. Like I think about my own father, who
is a Mormon man who has a degree in engineering,
who is a very intellectual and very pro academia, somewhat
concerned not somewhat very conservative Christian, and like he believes
in evolution. His wife was a biology teacher throughout her
entire career. And yet when it comes down to it,
and I start to question him because he doesn't believe
in like special creation per se. He believes in evolution,
but he does not think it is responsible for speciation,
which to me just blows my mind because that's kind
of the point of it all, you know. And so
I think that there's there's always ways for individuals to
have kind of special pleading and seek out evidence that
confirms whatever their fundamental sacred cows are. And then you
have these individuals who say, you know what, I'm going
to challenge my sacred cow, which is a very brave
thing to do.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So you mentioned Darwin. Charles Darwin. He's a great example,
I think because he, as you said, I mean, I
think he really struggled with this question over the course
of his life, and by the end of his life.
You know, in his autobiography, which he wrote just for
his family. It was his family ended ended up being published,
but he wrote it just for his family. And in
his autobiography he talks about his loss of faith, so
he you know, he really left the faith that he
had grown up in, and I think he became, you know,
at least agnostic. Actually, his friend Thomas Henry Huxley, I believe,
coined the word agnostic. But Darwin, you know, there are
a couple of different moments in his life. One of
them was the loss of his very beloved daughter at
age ten from tuberculosis, and I think that, you know,
that was instrumental in but also his work obviously on
natural history and evolution, and he talks about in one
really kind of powerful passage, he talks about these Igneumoniday,
these wasps that inject their eggs into a living caterpillar,
and the eggs hatch in there and they eat the
caterpillar from inside at the larvae, you know, eat the
caterpillar from the inside, and they save the vital organs
for last, so that the caterpillar will remain alive and fresh,
you know, while they're eating it. And Darwin says, you know,
how can what kind of benevolent god, you know, could
be consistent with a system like that, you know, and
so he moved away from it. But at the same time,
I mean, and this maybe is relevant for your father,
that Darwin was really very concerned to make sure that
people didn't feel they had to choose between God and Darwin.
You know, so he really wanted to insist that, you know,
his theory was consistent with a god kind of working
from behind the scenes, and he really wanted his ideas
to be adopted. And that was you know, partly why.
But he was adamant that people not have to feel,
you know, they had to be atheists in order to
believe in evolution.
Speaker 1: It's definitely easier if you're an atheist, that's for sure.
But you're right, there are plenty of people out there,
I mean even today, who have their own personal religion
and who can take evolutionary theory and they can find
some sort of theology, some sort of common ground. And
something I always talk about with my page, you know,
who are often nearing death or who are grappling with
their own mortality is sort of when it comes to religion,
just like, when it comes to a lot of things,
a culturation is a good example as well. You take
what you like, you take what serves you, and you
leave the rest right like, you make your own version
of it. And it does seem like these are things
that many of these scientists were grappling with. So let's
get into the actual kind of the evolution of Lamarque maybe.
I mean, we did talk a little bit about situating
him in his time, but is there any other kind
of zeitgeist context that you think is necessary for this conversation? Oh?
Speaker 2: Sure, Well, one thing I could say, he lived through
these extraordinarily tumultuous times politically. He lived right through the
French Revolution and through the various you know, through Napoleon,
the various phases of Napoleon, and into the restoration of
the Bourbon monarchy. So it was sort of constant political turmoil,
and he he was hated by Napoleon. And I think,
you know, maybe this brings me to you know, it's
a good time to mention what I think is really
most important about Lamarck's theory. I've sort of hinted at
it already, but he really his whole theory is founded
on the agency of living organisms, the creative agency, their
ability to create and transform themselves and the world around them.
And he thinks that begins with the very very simplest organisms,
which he says are spontaneously generated from heat and electricity
and you know, other natural forces acting on inani it
matter that causes the spontaneous generation of the very very
simplest just like algae and single celled organisms. And then
from that moment they begin to act, and they act
in more and more complex ways as they grow in complexity. Oh,
I should say, he thinks he kind of hypothesized a
force that he thinks is intrinsic to living matter, organic matter,
which he calls the power of life, the pouv woilduna vi,
the power of life. So that's where I got the
title of my book. I had wanted to call it
The Professor of Insects and Worms because I thought that
would sound like a novel, and that's it was his title,
But in the end my editor persuaded me that the
Power of Life was a better title.
Speaker 1: Anyway.
Speaker 2: It's all about the agency of organisms to create and
transform themselves and the world around them. I think that's
what made his ideas so very controversial Napoleon, you know,
I mean, first of all, religious people like Cuvier didn't
like that for obvious reasons. You know, he was usurping
God's it's creative agency. People like I don't think Napoleon
was very devout, but he also did not admire a
theory that distributed creative agency all throughout the living world.
He was more into the consolidation of power.
Speaker 1: And I think, like he may not have been devout,
but he was probably pretty like xenophobic and racist, right, Like,
My assumption is that there a lot of this stuff
also is steeped in the idea that like, some are
better and some are worse, and so it's very important
that everybody has the same sort of agency and power.
Speaker 2: Well exactly and so well, and so coming back to Darwin,
I mean, Charles Darwin took on board actually a lot
of Lamarck's ideas, including Darwin. So this is something I
want to really emphasize because people deny it all the time.
Darwin believed in what we now call the inheritance of
acquired characteristics, or what he called the inherited effective use
and disuse. He took that he took you know, sort
of he adopted, in keeping with lamark the idea that
living forms are always changing, and also the idea that
living organisms change themselves in ways that are inherited so
that they have you know, Darwin's whole theory of sexual
selection also had to do with the animals exerting their
aesthetic preferences and their creative agency in the world. But
then Darwin's followers after he died, I think I already
mentioned the neo Darwinis at the turn of the nineteenth
and twentieth century eradicated all of the kind of Lamarckian aspect.
They rendered living beings completely passive, as passive as they
had been under the old argument from design. And that's
what this is a long way of responding to what
you were saying about rankings of human beings, is that
the establishment of that neo Darwinist theory went hand in
hand with the establishment of eugenics. So the idea that
living organisms are the kind of passive objects of kind
of biological determinist you know, ultimately genetic programming and then
outside forces acting on them, that was a very congenial
idea for eugenicists and eugenics and the development of neo
Darwinists evolutionary theory really went hand in hand. Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So because in order to think like a eugenicist,
you don't necessarily need to be religious. It doesn't have
to be God who ordained you know, this as more
pure or more having better fitness, or more worthy of reproduction,
and that over there as being somehow damaged and needing
to be taken out of the gene pool. It doesn't
there doesn't have to be God, but there does have
to be some arbiter of what are quote good genes
and what are quote bad genes. So it does kind
of take on its own religious fervor even if it's
not I guess supernatural, right right?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Julian Huxley, who was an a British biologist who
was one of the founding figures in this you know,
neo darwin is new interpretation of evolutionary theory that banished
all ideas of Lamarckian inheritance and animal agency and all
that he said, isn't this great? We can become the
managing directors, I think he said, the general manager or
the managing directors of evolution, and we can you know,
design humans as we think they should be designed. So
that was one of the really eye opening things about
working on the book for me, because the first three
parts of the book take place during Lamarck's lifetime, and
then the last part, the part four, follows his science
from his up into the present. And I was, first
of all, I was surprised the degree to which the
kind of banishment of Lamark was definitive of theo Darwinists
evolutionary theory, and also the degree to which neo Darwinist
evolutionary theory was basically eugenic. I mean, all the major
figures pretty much with that exception, were eugenicists.
Speaker 1: You know, I think about there's I remember going to
a talk once about modern perceptions of evolutionary theory and
the speaker gosh, I wish I could remember who it was.
I've mentioned this on the show before. They shared a
photograph that was just so incredibly like it, Like you
could hear an audible gasp in the audience when they
saw this photograph. Somebody had gone into the periodical's room
of a large university, and anybody who's been to like
one of these, you know sections of the library, all
the books look the exact same, because they're these bound
copies of every journal ever and they had taken a
photograph of the year. I just googled it nineteen fifty
four where the journal which was established in nineteen twenty
five by Pearson, the Annals of Human Human Eugenics. No,
it's called the Annals of Eugenics.
Speaker 2: Eugenics, yes, and in nineteen.
Speaker 1: Fifty four, and they took a picture and you could
see it change over right, And it's like, if you
have any question of the history of this, you know
of this school of thought and where we were at
this particular time, and who the architects were, please understand
that there is a lot of intentionality here. And it's
so interesting that you are grappling with the time period
that predates this, but was the beginnings of all of
this type of thought and all of the arguments within
the different disciplines. And again you cannot you cannot extricate
it from religion and from sort of superiority of thought.
You can't extricate the science from the political foibles of
the individuals doing the science.
Speaker 2: No, that's absolutely right. Yeah, And I mean, you know,
it is really kind of astounding. As you say, the
Annals of eugenics became the Annals of Genetics. But also,
you know, all of the important major scientists involved in
kind of these early genetics and the founding of this
kind of new interpretation of evolutionary theory were eugenesis. So
I'll give the example. I always think of this example
of a conference in London in nineteen sixty two that
had all of these major scientists present at it, and
one of them is So they were talking about the
problem as they saw it, that rich people have fewer
children than poor people, and they assumed that rich people
were biologically superior to poor people. And so if that
continued to be the case, they said, you know, the
human race is going to degrade. What do we do
about it? And so Francis Krik, the Nobel laureate said,
you know, discoverer of the double one of the discoverers
of the double helix of DNA, the DNA molecule, along
with Rosalind Franklin and James Watson. Anyway, he said, it
should be a simple matter too for any government to
put a sterilizing agent in the food supply. And then
if people want to have children, they can apply for
a license. And if they're given a license, they also
receive an antidote. And he said, maybe that wouldn't be
a very popular idea, you know, chuckle, chuckle, but it
should be. It should be doable anyway. And in the room,
like everybody was on board with this, except for like
all the scientists pretty much were on board with it.
The people who raised objections were not scientists. There was
Alex Comfort, who was going to go on to write
The Joy of Sex. I think he hadn't written it yet,
but there was a guy named Derek desla Price who
was a historian of science at Yale. There was an
Anglican minister I think. But the scientists, you know, all
thought that was a reasonable idea. So yeah, it's just
an example of how deeply ingrained that was.
Speaker 1: And I can't help but also point out, not that
I'm going off like really a far afield now, but
probably that room was only full of men, right.
Speaker 2: Yes, I believe it was all men. I believe it
was all men. Actually, this is an occasion maybe also
for me to say something about Lamark, which was that
one of the striking things about him, he you know,
almost alone among his contemporaries and the people around him,
he never ranked human beings by sex, by race, by class,
by anything else. All around him, people were very busy
coming up with, you know, biological explanations of why you know,
rich people were superior poor people, and European white people
were smarter than Africans, and you know, etc. Where men
were smarter than women. He never did that. Although, I mean,
as an invertebrate zoologist, he spent all of his a
lot of his career taxonomizing, coming up with classifications, and
he named over six thousand species, and he was very
interested in taxonomy. But for human beings, he everything he
had to say about human beings was universal, you know,
And I really think that's striking. I mean, I think
it has to do with the fact that his theory
of living beings, including human beings, was not reductive. It
was really about kind of creative potential, self potential for
self transformation and action agency in the world, and not reductive.
So it's not like he couldn't have come up with
a racist, you know, way of thinking consistent with that,
but he didn't. You know. The fact is, as far
as I at least as far as anyone can tell,
he didn't do that. And I do associate it with
the anti reductiveness of his general way of thinking.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. And so what is it about. I guess
I'm always curious about kind of who I'm like, how
do I put this? I think that in modern history
of science and and sort of modern journalistic takes on
the the scientific story, more and more we're having we're
grappling with the reality that there that's whole myth or
that whole narrative of like the lone scientist kind of
coming up with all of this really interesting and important
paradigm shifting thought is sort of a myth that very
often there were like many people involved, and there were
you know, obviously a lot of women or people of
color or other you know, voices that just like never
made it into the into the the the record because
well we know why. But I'm curious about because Lamark
he does seem to be one of these sort of
like lone wolf type scientists. Do you think that that
is maybe an overblown description?
Speaker 2: Oh well, that that's of such an important question. Thank
you for asking that question. There are a few different
things I would say about that. One thing is that
he did have the advantage as I was mentioning of
coming sort of at the toward the end of a
period in which people were he had the benefit of
the work of people who came before him to try
and understand the living world in more naturalist terms. And
so in the French Enlightenment, you know, in the eighteenth
century in France, there were I'll mention a couple of names.
Direau Don di rou was a philosopher who suggested something
like a transformation of living forms over time. His but
Lamarq's mentor in the Garden of Plants, George Bouffont, his
sort of protector, great naturalist and director of the Garden
of Plants was another example. And you know, in general,
people had been doing all kinds of work in that direction,
and he came sort of toward the end of that work.
Another really important thing to mention is that he had
the great advantage that he was sitting at the seat,
you know, at the kind of focal point of an empire,
and he uh, he did very little traveling. He never
traveled on the ocean, and as far as I know,
never saw the sea, even though he introduced the idea
that the sea was the cradle of life. I don't
think he ever actually saw the sea, but he received
huge numbers of specimens from French imperial travelers who went
all over the planet, you know, and so he had
that enormous advantage. And those travelers included all kinds of people,
including a woman named Jean Varret who cross dressed, she
dressed as a valet, as a male valet to accompany
her lover Commerson on the around the world voyage of Bougainville.
And so she was a heroic, really heroic figure who
collected a lot of the specimens that ended up in
Lamarq's hands. And of course those French travel those French
imperial travelers were also getting the benefit of, as you said,
of indigenous helpers and people who gave them information all
over the world, you know. So so Lamark certainly had
the benefit of all of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh gosh, I want to see a film about
that woman's life. That sounds amazing. Yeah, she's what a badass.
And how sad that so many of those stories are
you know, they're not lost to history is such a
gross euphemism, but like, just people don't know about them, right,
They weren't the elevated stories and we have to dig
deep in order to learn about them, which I think
is it's such an important aspect of the work that
you do, both as a historian but also as somebody
who popularizes or who's able to take this very academic
knowledge and put it into narrative form, you know, for
the public, for like a trade publication. I think that's
so important to be able to hear about these stories
and to understand again, like all of the forces at
play and all of the plurality of hard work and
labor and voices and perspectives that ultimately, I guess are
the foundation for sometimes you know, these lone white dudes
who get all of the credit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, very true. I do sometimes feel like we keep
on telling the same you know, five stories over and
over and over and over, and there's a whole world
of people out there, you know that would be interesting
to talk about. Why do we just keep talking about
the same five people?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so I'm often you know, all scientists, I
think a big part of their mental labor is grappling
with the concept of categorization, right of lumping and splitting
and and you know, labeling and taxonomy and classification. These
are just like I think very large like philosophical concepts
within many science fields, but especially biology. And I'm even
doing it right now because I was about to ask
you the question of, like, you know, kind of based
on all of the work that you've done, based on
all of the ability to sort of situate in time
and reflect back from obviously this hindsight position that we have.
I was going to ask, like, what did Lamart get right?
And what did Lamart get wrong? You know, kind of
like why do we think of him as like that
guy who is wrong? And then oh, and then Darwin
is that guy who is right? Because it's really a
more complex picture than that, isn't it.
Speaker 2: It really is, yeah, very much so. So I think
the reason we think of him as the guy that
was wrong is because there has been really a kind
of tradition from one moment to the next of how
shall I say, there's been a kind of orthodoxy, an
involving orthodoxy about the wrongness of Lamark. So I mentioned
that first there was Cuvier, his nemesis and colleague, who
actually ironically had the task of writing his eulogy and
when he died. When Lamark died, Cuvier was the director
of the Institute, the National Institute, and had the job
of writing Lamark's eulogy, and it must be the most
nasty eulogy ever written, in which he basically said Lamarck's
science was poetry and not science, and that you know,
I mentioned Napoleon already. You know, I think there's been
sort of an ongoing kind of handed down from generations
generation tradition of marginalizing Lamark's ideas again, because I think
his ideas have been threatening to initially to religious you know, orthodoxy,
but then also to the powerful, to Napoleon, to people
who were you know, I mean, the alternative of a
kind of passive living world was much more attractive to
the powerful. So that's why I think, you know, there
has been this kind of tradition that has led us
to see Lamark as the guy who got everything wrong.
The last this is a spoiler a spoiler alert. The
last sentence of the book is Lamarck was right. And
I realized that that's a very provocative last sentence. But
what I mean by it is not necessarily that he
was right about you know, the specifics of how living
beings transform themselves from generation to generation, but simply that
organisms have evolutionary agency, that organisms, by their actions affect
the course of evolution, and that is something that I
think is returning to mainstream biology and many fields today,
in fields like epigenetic inheritance in the study of animal
behavior and how it leads natural selection in niche construction,
which is about how animals create the environmental niches that
then exert selective pressure on them, so that it's a
kind of two way street. So broadly speaking, what I
mean by Lamark was right is that organisms have evolutionary
agency of many kinds, and biology has kind of overlooked
that for a long time and is finally coming back
to kind of take a better look at that.
Speaker 1: I love that because I think what that shows is
that scientific thought and really we can say sort of
whether we're talking about a quote theory or really like
a philosophy that is developed through scientific observation and experimentation,
it's a lot more than just the tagline that we
take away. You know, so and so discovered that X
is hy no. So and so developed a way of
thinking about something with all sorts of nuance, and even
if X ultimately didn't equal why, a lot of the
processes there may have had real staying power. And I
love that it takes that gray and that nuance, and
it really shows us that it's not just that entire
person's life work or that entire tone is you know,
throw out the baby with the bathwater versus you know
it's all true.
Speaker 2: Because that's never how science works.
Speaker 1: We're always iterating and having to add all these little
new developments and subtract things that are no longer holding
you know, explanatory power. And I think it's such an
important way of thinking about the scientific process, both within
somebody's lab or lifespan or you know, the paradigms within
our sort of life cycle, but also like science as
a whole. And I think about the fact that, like,
where was I going with this? There was an important
point and maybe it wasn't important, but.
Speaker 2: A point that important.
Speaker 1: A point that I wanted to make is that sometimes
when we think, oh, Lamark was wrong, I think we
erroneously throw Lamark on the same pile as somebody Likelysenko,
And I think, you know, we have to be very
careful when we think wrong and right, or like the
early phrenologists like Gaul, well you know what, yes, phrenology
is pseudoscience, and yes, there's a lot of bullshit there,
but also, you know, Broadman then was able to define
all these specific areas of the brain that really is
very similar in some ways to phrenology. So it's like
take the good and leave the rest behind.
Speaker 2: Although interestingly, Lamark rejected phrenology. He thought that was a
really stupid idea. He thought it was a big mistake
and that you know, and he specifically said, this is
all wrong, this is a that's hilarious. But let me
say about Lysenko. Actually, oh, there are too many things.
You just open up too many directions. Now I don't
know which direction to go. But I'll let me pick
up Lasenko first. So I think many people I've already said,
you know, I think a lot of people associate Lamark
with drafts. We've already talked about that. Another thing, like
the next association is Lysenko, because so Lysenko was a
Soviet agronomist biologist who in the nineteen forties he claimed
that he could change the germination season of wheat by
subjecting it to cold and moisture, which in fact he
could do. Farmers already did that, but then he said
that the changes would be inherited in the next generation,
and that was false, and he invoked Lamark. Now it
wasn't really properly speaking Lamarckian because he was talking about
changes inflicted from outside rather than emerging from within. But anyway,
he invoked la Mark Stalin adopted his ideas, and you
know it was no joke. I mean, there was one geneticist,
for example, named Vavilov who was arrested and died in prison.
So it became very very hard to do genetics research
in the Soviet Union and even dangerous. But at the
same time, in the West it became so just because
the Soviet Union was ideological about this doesn't mean that
the West wasn't ideological. So in Europe and Western Europe
and in America it became very hard to do research
on any element outside of random genetic variation and natural
selection for equally ideological reason. And Julian Huxley, who who
I've already mentioned, one of the founders of the neo
Darwinist modern synthesis, he seized on this moment on Lisenko
to represent basically Lamarckism with Soviet Communism. With the death
of science, you know, And what he said was the
Soviets can't accept genetics because they can't accept the genetic inequality. Basically,
we are all unequal, and the Soviets are radical egalitarians.
They can't accept inequality. But we in the West, we
know that we're unequal. And our motto is free but unequal.
He literally said, our motto is freak or free and unequal.
And the idea was that he was going to channel
genetic inequality through eugenics to improve you know, this is
going to be sort of Western freedom. So yeah, Lisenko,
it is very That's there's a Lisenko episode in the book.
Speaker 1: For sure, it's incredible. And then it's like and then
we constantly come back to where we are now and
we situate ourselves as the end all be all, sort
of the terminal point of the story. And I think
this is one of the biggest frustrations and difficulties with
the human experience of trying to understand evolutionary biology. And
why so many I think lay people but even scientists
really struggle is we rely so heavily on hindsight bias
that we think everything was leading up to this moment
instead of saying no, no, no, we are just one of
many moments and it will continue on. And it had
no goal orientation towards becoming us like we are not
somehow the perfect form that it was all working towards.
But I think it's really hard not to see through
that lens, because you know, we're all the main actor
in our own play.
Speaker 2: Well, very true and Lamark actually interestingly, he started with
an idea that was more like progressive toward better and
better and better, and you know, more and more are
sophisticated and complex and advanced. And he struggled, you know,
to try and make his taxonomy fit that model, and
gradually he had to give it up. You know, he
had so many examples where two different species were different
from one another, but you couldn't say one was more
complex than the other because one was more complex in
certain ways, but the other, you know, in other ways.
And so he ended up with this what he called
very branchy structure, which is sort of outward, not just upward,
but outward. And I think that that's really like an
important feature of his theory also was that he had
ultimately had to relinquish that kind of strict hierarchy. Oh,
I wanted to say a couple other things. Actually there's
they're kind of tangents, but they think they're relevant. So
one of them was that Lamarck. He he was the
I think people associate with Darwin the idea that humans
have descended from earlier primates, But Darwin actually cited Lamark.
Lamarck had had introduced that idea much earlier. And but
when lamar is so, lamar said, you know, there were
these primates who probably came down from the trees and
wanted to walk upright and use their hands and for tools,
and you know, so they by pursuing these projects, they
kind of transformed themselves over time into human beings. But
then the story he tells is not such a beautiful
story because these human beings, the way that they kind
of made themselves human, he says, is by oppressing the
other primates and making their lives a misery and driving
them off to the kind of impoverished corners of the
earth and hounding the geese and so and he says,
you know, this is sort of something that he sees
in human nature that he really worried about toward the
end of his life, and his last last thing he published.
He has this very despairing so at this point he
was elderly and blind, and his very devoted daughter was
helping him write this last work, and he has this
despairing passage in which he says, he talks about deforestation
and you know, the destruction of habitats and plot really
environmental change, and he says, it looks as though, you know,
humans keep going on waging wars. And you know, he
had witnessed the industrial revolution firsthand, and he had seen,
you know, trying to extract pp profit and he said,
it looks like we're going to make the globe uninhabitable,
were the human human kind will render itself extinct by
making the globe uninhabitable. And so he wrote that in
eighteen twenty you know, something like eighteen twenty three or something.
So I mean, yeah, it really, it really is kind
of extraordinary to think of that that he already had
those those concerns.
Speaker 1: So I know we mentioned this at the beginning, but
I'm curious maybe to put a button on it and
to understand a little bit more fully how was he
received throughout his lifespan, Like how I know it's probably
not monolithic. But you know, from the beginning of his
work until you know, with different works that he published,
and whether we're talking about within like French intellectual circles
or beyond, what was the sort of general reception to
Lamarq's work.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's a complicated story because on the
one hand, he had the support of people like George Bouffont,
who was very very influential, and another Geoffois Santideo. You know,
there were people around him who were very supportive and
very receptive to his ideas. But then there were very
important and powerful enemies like Cuvier and then Napoleon. There's
a famous story when he went to present his great work,
The Zoological Philosophy to Napoleon in eighteen oh nine. The
story is told was told by a young well an
astronomer named Flocois Arago, who was a young man at
the time twenty three I think, who happened to be
standing nearby Lamark and who witnessed this. They were in
the Tuileries Palace and the Emperor. You know, they were
all supposed to be presenting, all the members of the
Institute presenting their new works to the Emperor, and Napoleon came,
you know, marching in and when Lamark tried to present
his work, his book, Napoleon snatched it from him and
you know, growled, I'm taking this only out of respect
for your white hair, and sort of publicly humiliated him.
And so then moving on, you know, through through the ages,
I mean after that, I think Darwin certainly read Lamark
and used Lamarck's ideas and cites them, but he also
knew that an association with Lamark would be quite damaging
because people associated Lamarckism with atheism and the French Revolution
and regicide and all of these things. And so Darwin
was sort of mixed in what he said about Lamark.
You know, sometimes he speaks about him very scathing, the
other times he cites his ideas admiringly, and so, you know,
I just think it's been a kind of complicated situation
all throughout, you know, from Lamarque's lifetime up until today.
And maybe that's because he was such a radical thinker
that his ideas have been very inspiring but also have
provoked a great deal of controversy.
Speaker 1: Wow, So what is your sort of big I don't know,
what was it that drew you to him. Why did
you grapple so deeply with this complicated man, with the
complicated legacy of his work, and you know, want to
commit yourself to this, as you mentioned, centuries long project.
You know, this is this really intense. I mean, you
did a lot of work here. What is it that
kept you going?
Speaker 2: Well? I think first of all, what first brought me
to him was that I had written this earlier book
called The Russell's Clock, which is about a kind of
struggle as I see it in the life sciences between
active and passive bottles of life. Basically those people who
wanted to see living beings as kind of passive design
machinery versus a tradition of active you know, seeing living
beings as active and self baking and self transforming. And Lamark,
I mean, I kind of wrote my way through this book,
and again it took me centuries to write that book too.
I got to the very final stage of it and
I thought, oh my gosh, this whole book should have
been about Lamark, but I just cannot bear to rewrite
it again, so I will just have to write him
a new book, you know, write another book about him.
So that was I think, how it began. But then
what I also wanted to try is, you know, this
is my first book for a trade press, trying to
write for a larger audience, and the fact that it's
a life story makes it, you know, and the life
of somebody who lived through all of this tumult and
kind of these extraordinary times. It lent itself to being
more of a narrative. And I've really found out that
I really love writing that way. You know, I love
reading novels, y, I'm a novels addict. Yeah, And I
found out that actually writing in a more narrative way
is more fun in the way that reading novels is fun.
So I really enjoyed doing that, and I think it
also helped to have so the advice that I've heard
often for people who write trade nonfiction is that you
should try to write for, you know, a college sophomore,
a smart, smart college sophomore. Like so, my students at
Stanford are a good example. They're very smart, very curious,
very eager to learn stuff, but they're not expert in
anything yet, so you know, that's what you're trying to
And and my children were also kind of that age.
I have two children who are around that age when
when I was working on this book, and so I
also had them in mind, even more personal idea of
an audience in mind, and so I really, you know,
I really loved trying to tell a little Mark's life
story in a way that would this larger argument about
the history of ways of regarding living beings and maybe
even kind of a plea for a return to taking
the agency of living beings.
Speaker 1: Seriously, I love that, and I think you're absolutely right,
you know, reading these words, I think what is so
important is the sort of narrative nature, the storytelling component.
That is, you know, we are as human beings we
need story, and we we're desperate and hungry for story.
And so if if something reads that way, it's always
going to keep our attention. And you know, one thing
that I always say in my kind of career as
a science communicator, I have I have a talk I
sometimes give about about science communication and sort of the
you know, the important I don't know rules quote unquote
of science communication, and one of them is always, and
it flies in the face of a lot of other
people's advice, but never underestimate the intelligence of your audience.
But always underestimate their vocabulary, like they're not specialists. You know,
they don't know all of these words, but that doesn't
mean they don't understand the concepts.
Speaker 2: Right, right, right, that's very nice. I like that very much.
I'm gonna I'm gonna keep that in mind. I'm gonna
use that myself.
Speaker 1: And I think you did use it without using it right,
like you know that like telling these stories, these are
not too complex for people to understand. They're right in
that sweet spot of intellectual curiosity and questioning, and they
do that work. That's that fundamentally important academic work of
making us stop and think, making us question our assumptions
of you know, kind of putting us in a position
of opening our minds just a little bit more than
they were open before, and also learning something along the way,
but not scaring us off, not making us think, oh
this is too much for me, or I'm never gonna
get this. And I think that is that beautiful sweet
spot when it comes to science communication. And I think
that you know, as you mentioned before, psychologists may be
fundamentally curious about not being kind of isolated or too
silo in their work. I think that historians are often
in a unique position of being able to tell masterful
stories that keep us just wrapped about what we know now.
How we know what we know now. We're never going
to understand without the narrative, without the story of how
we got to this place. And so you know, I
love these kinds of books. So I'm so glad that
you wrote it first of all, but I'm also just
so so glad that you shared shared so much interesting
information with us today.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much. It's been really, really a
pleasure and a joy to talk to.
Speaker 1: You, absolutely everybody. The book is The Power of Life,
The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean
Baptiste Lamarck, by doctor Jessica Riskin. Jessica, thank you so
much for being here and everybody listening. Thank you for
coming back week after week. I'm really looking forward to
the next time we all get together to talk. Nerdye