Part 4

A fine example of this appears in the fourth volume of Buffon’s “Natural History.” “If we once admit” says he, “that the ass belongs to the horse family, and that it only differs from it because it has been modified, we may likewise say that the monkey is of the same family as man, that it is a modified man, that man and the monkey have had a common origin like the horse and ass, that each family has had but a single source, and even that all the animals have come from a single animal, which in the succession of ages has produced, while perfecting and modifying itself, all the races of other animals.... If it were known that in the animals there had been, I do not say several species, but a single one which had been produced by modification from another species; if it were true that the ass is only a modified horse, there would be no limit to the power of nature, and we would not be wrong in supposing that from a single being she has known how to derive, with time, all the other organized beings.”

There is no such clear statement of the evolutionary theory in the “System of Nature” of Linnaeus, and if Buffon had proclaimed these views as his own and courageously defended them, he would have made his name the greatest of the 18th century, and clothed himself with immortality. But the stuff of martyrs did not enter into his composition, and the very next passage to the one above, translated reads--“But no! It is certain from revelation that all animals have alike been favored with the grace of an act of direct creation, and that the first pair of every species issued fully formed from the hands of the creator.”

When the Sorbonne thought it was being fooled it compelled Buffon to recant publicly and have his recantation printed. In that recantation he announced, “I abandon everything in my book respecting the formation of the earth and generally all which may be contrary to the narrative of Moses.”

The impression we get from reading Buffon, is that he did not realize the importance of those great evolutionary ideas which he stated so well and repudiated as regularly. Had he done so and stood by them, he would have been the Darwin of his day, but he would in all likelihood have spent the latter part of his life in the Bastile.

Not until forty years later do we meet the real and valiant precursor of Darwin, albeit a countryman of Buffon’s, but with a more profoundly philosophical mind and without his fear. This was Jean Baptiste Lamarck, born at Bazentin, France, 1744, and educated at the college of the Jesuits at Amiens. He served in the seven years war and then occupied himself studying medicine and science at Paris. He died, poor and blind, in 1829.

Lamarck boldly proclaimed his unshakable faith in the doctrine of the transformation of species, and defended it against the strong tide of popular disfavor and the overwhelming opposition provoked by the antagonism of the great zoologist Cuvier. Cuvier’s opposition would have crushed a weaker man but Lamarck bore bravely up and calmly left his case for the future to decide. Cuvier held species to be constant, as was consonant with current and orthodox ideas. This made him a social favorite and the pet of the church, and honors were showered profusely upon him to the end of his days. Not so Lamarck; although born 25 years earlier, his theories were half a century in advance of Cuvier’s, and he paid the penalty that has so often overtaken those pioneers whose vision anticipated the future.

“Attacked on all sides,” says his friend and colleague, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, “injured likewise by odious ridicule, Lamarck, too indignant to answer these cutting epigrams, submitted to the indignity with a sorrowful patience.... Lamarck lived a long while poor, blind, and forsaken, but not by me; I shall ever love and venerate him.” Another writer of that period exclaims, “Lamarck, thy abandonment, sad as it was in thy old age, is better than the ephemeral glory of men who maintain their reputation by sharing in the errors of their time.” As to Cuvier, the one stain on his career is his unworthy attitude toward his celebrated opponent and fellow worker. Lamarck had, with his usual generosity, aided and favored him when he first came to the Museum of Natural History at Paris, allowing him to hold, in addition to his own chair, which was in Vertebrate Zoology, the chair of Molluscs, which was in Lamarck’s special field, where he had no equal, and which was properly his. But Lamarck opposed, with great politeness and without mentioning his name the attempt made by Cuvier to harmonize science with the orthodox theology of his day by means of that theory of “cataclysms” which in spite of its being strenuously defended by so recent a thinker as Agassiz, has been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories.

When Lamarck died, Cuvier as his most notable contemporary was called upon to pronounce his eulogy. What a miserable and unworthy performance it was! Even after death, religious antipathy--that ever-flowing fountain of meanness--survived in Cuvier’s breast, and De Blainville records that “the Academy did not even allow it to be printed in the form in which it was pronounced,” and it is said that portions of it had to be omitted as unfit for publication. Haeckel, speaking of Lamarck’s great book, “Zoological Philosophy,” complains that “Cuvier, Lamarck’s greatest opponent, in his ‘Report on the Progress of Natural Science,’ in which the most unimportant anatomical investigations are enumerated, does not devote a single word to this work, which forms an epoch in science.”

But history has reversed the scales and posterity has repaired the wrong. That theory of biological evolution, which was despised and rejected by the builders of his day has become the corner-stone of modern knowledge, while Cuvier’s fantastic “Theory of the Earth” has gone to the museum of curiosities.

Lamarck’s immortality is secured by his assertion and defense of the theory of descent, alone. This theory is, that all existing species have descended from ancestors who were in a vast number of cases, and ultimately in all, very different from their present representatives; that this difference is due, not to the total extinction of the previous species by “cataclysms,” and the divine creation of new ones, as Cuvier maintained, but because previous species changed in adapting themselves to a changed environment.

But Lamarck has another claim to a niche in the Pantheon of Science. As the conviction gained ground that species were not fixed and immutable as they came from the hands of an alleged creator, but were the products of an evolutionary development extending through immense periods of time, another question arose and called for an answer. That question was--“By what process?”

Charles Darwin is the most illustrious of all the sons of science because he answered that question. Lamarck gave an answer, and the question as to whether that answer is entitled to be incorporated in the answer of Darwin, as a supplementary amendment is sometimes made a part of the motion, still divides the biological world into two camps. But in that controversy between the Weismannians and the Neo-Lamarckians, aptly called “The Battle of the Darwinians,” no matter what becomes of the Lamarckian factor, all are agreed that the “Natural Selection” of Darwin is impregnable.

Lamarck’s theory may be summed up as follows--

(1.) Every change in the environment of animals creates for them new needs.

(2.) These new needs will compel these animals to adopt new habits and discard some old ones, and these needs and habits will produce and develop new organs.

(3.) The development or disappearance of organs depends on their use or disuse.

(4.) The effects of use or disuse, acquired by animals, are transmitted by heredity to their offspring.

This fourth factor has split the biological world since Weismann repudiated it in 1883.

As a typical case of the operation of his theory, Lamarck gives the following: “The serpents having taken up the habit of gliding along the ground, and of concealing themselves in the grass, their body, owing to continually repeated efforts to elongate itself so as to pass through narrow spaces, has acquired a considerable length disproportionate to its size. Moreover limbs would have been very useless to these animals, and consequently would not have been employed because long legs would have interfered with their need of gliding, and very short legs, not being more than four in number, would have been incapable of moving their body. Hence the lack of use of these parts having been constant in the races of these animals, has caused the total disappearance of these same parts, although really included in the plan of organization of animals of their class.”

The idea of the serpent getting its long body, or the giraffe its long neck, or shore birds their long legs by “stretching,” has brought a good deal of ridicule upon Lamarck’s theory, and that part of it has never been taken very seriously.

This mistake however, will no more affect Lamarck’s title to a place among the immortals, than will the equally unfortunate theory of “pangenesis” endanger the status of his still greater successor--Darwin.

Lamarck’s glory is that he boldly proclaimed and largely proved the general theory of descent--biological evolution.

We shall now proceed to a consideration of the efforts of the great savants who have succeeded him, to ascertain its processes.

III.

DARWIN’S NATURAL SELECTION.

In the year 1906, the paper which has the largest circulation among English Socialists, “The Clarion,” took a vote of its readers as to whom they considered to be the greatest man, the man who had contributed most to the progress of the race, which England had produced. By an overwhelming majority the place of honor went to Charles Darwin. That vote was as much a vindication of English Socialists as it was of the man whose name has become almost a synonym for “modern science.”

Liebknecht, in his “Biographical Memoirs of Karl Marx”, speaking of Marx and himself, says: ”When Darwin drew the consequences of his investigations and presented them to the public, we spoke for months of nothing else but Darwin and the revolutionizing power of his scientific conquests.”

Leopold Jacoby writes thus: “The same year in which appeared Darwin’s book (1859) and coming from a quite different direction, an identical impulse was given to a very important development of social science by a work which long passed unnoticed, and which bore the title: “Critique of Political Economy” by Karl Marx--it was the forerunner of Capital. What Darwin’s book on the “Origin of Species” is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of organic life from non-sentient nature up to Man, the work of Marx is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of association among human beings, of States, and the social forms of humanity.”