SCIENCEPHOTO^ LIBRARY,^ GETTY,^ ALAMYX^3TIMELINE
5 he proposed that the Earth was
inconceivably old, that species had
mutated through time and that man
would one day become extinct.
Like Maillet and his contemporary
the Comte de Buffon – who slipped
evolutionary ideas into his great
volumes on the history of the animals- Diderot, fearful of prison, published
his most radical ideas posthumously.
A few decades later, the French
Revolution produced the conditions in
which evolutionary ideas flourished
most rapidly. There were no priests to
police philosophical questions or
threaten inquisition. Napoleon had
brought the largest collection of
natural history specimens in history
into the Museum of Natural History
in Pa ris, specimens looted f rom
European palaces. He appointed 12
professors to the Jardin des Plantes
to work on a number of natu ral
philosophical problems, alongside
students from all over Europe. It was
not long before the most carefully
worked-out theory of evolution thus
far emerged.
From 1801 until his death in 1829,
the Parisian Professor of Invertebrates
and Worms, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck,
proposed that nature had worked to
transform species over unimaginable
t racts of time f rom single-celled to
complex organisms. The environment
caused animals to adopt new habits to
su r vive, he claimed; in so doing t hey
produced new structures – teeth,
limbs, long necks. His ideas were
both mocked and refuted by his more
powerful and influential colleague in
the Jardin, the great comparative
anatomist Georges Cuvier.
Thinking alike
Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin
reached similar conclusions about the
evolution of species at about the same
time, without knowing each other and
by different routes. Darwin, who was a
poet a nd inventor as well as a doctor,
proposed that all organisms had once
been aquatic filaments in a universal
ocean. Such ideas were dangerous;
in the wake of the revolution, Darwin
and his philosopher friends were also
under surveillance. Like Diderot,Darwin slipped his most controversial
ideas into footnotes or into his poetry;
his most radical theories were
published posthumously.
In the first decades of the 19th-
century, Lamarck’s influence fanned
out from Paris across Europe; the
thousands of young and idealistic
students who studied with him took
Lamarckian ideas like seeds back
across t he world. Ma ny used t hem
to underpin reformist agendas.
In 1825, a 16-year-old Charles
Darwin arrived in Edinburgh to study
at medical school and was befriended
by a physician who had studied with
Lamarck. Robert Grant, explained
Lamarck’s ideas to the young Darwin
and reminded him of how remarkable
his grandfather Erasmus’s ideas had
been. When he set off on the Beagle
reading Charles Lyell’s Principles of
Geology, he opened a notebook that he
titled the Transmutation Notebook.
His hunt for proof of the mutation of
species had begun.
The branching and converging
patterns in this history continue. In
Scotla nd in t he late 1830s, as Da r win
retu r ned f rom t he Beagle voyage wit h
an embryonic theory of natural
selection, a young publisher called
Robert Chambers found himself
converted to transmutationism by
reading accounts of Lamarck and
Erasmus Darwin’s ideas. His
sensational book Vestiges of the
Natural History of Creation, published
anonymously in 1844, was elegantly
written and cheap to buy. It fused
together new discoveries in zoology,
bota ny a nd geology to give a n account
of Earth’s history and of the evolution
of species. Vest iges made a number
of mista kes in its accounts of new
scientific discoveries and shocked
the establishment to its core. But, by
bringing evolution into the drawing
rooms of the public, it paved the way
for new, more evidence-based theories.
A remarkable young land surveyor
called Alfred Russel Wallace read
Vest iges in the Leicester public library
in the late 1840s. A few weeks later, he
read Thomas Robert Malthus’s Essay
On the Principle of Population.
Vest iges, Wallace told friends, was the1859
Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin
of Species in which he provides detailed
evidence for natural selection, as well
as a carefully
extended
argument for
this being the
mechanism by
which evolution
works.1858
While in a delirious
fever caused by
malaria on the Malay
Archipelago, Alfred
Russel Wallace comes
up with the idea of
natural selection.1748
The Telliamed,
written by Benoît
de Maillet (right)
between 1722 and
1732, is published
posthumously.
Maillet proposes
that humans have
evolved from aquatic
organisms and that intermediate half-
animal half-fish creatures survive.1794-6
Erasmus Darwin publishes Zoonomia,
or the Laws of Organic Life, a two-volume
medical treatise containing a chapter
called ‘Generation’ in which he proposes
that all living beings have evolved from
aquatic filaments.1802
A Professor of
Invertebrates in Paris,
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
(right), gives a lecture
in which he proposes
that all species have
evolved through
great lengths of time
and that they have evolved
through the need to adapt to the
environment.THE FUNDAMENTALS OF LIFE