96 Evolution and the Fossil Record
In addition to all these new facts from natural history, new attitudes were prevailing
in the 1700s. Often called “the Enlightenment,” it was a period of skepticism and question-
ing of dogmatic authority (especially royal authority and religious dogmas), as scholars
and philosophers sought rational, nonsupernatural explanations for the world. Inspired by
the breakthroughs in science and explaining nature pioneered by Bacon, Newton, Leibniz,
Pascal, and Galileo in previous centuries, Enlightenment scientists and philosophers
explored new and daring ideas, unfettered by the shackles of the powers that be. In France,
the Enlightenment was led by Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire, who questioned the author-
ity of the king of France and the church, and by Lavoisier and Buffon, who made scien-
tific breakthroughs in chemistry (Lavoisier) and proposed daring nonbiblical explanations
of nature (Buffon). In England, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes examined political and
economic systems and laid the foundation for the American experiment in democracy;
George Berkeley broke new ground in philosophy (as did Spinoza and Kant in Holland and
Germany); and the Industrial Revolution began with steam engines, textile manufacturing,
and canal systems transforming England from an agrarian nation to an industrialized one.
In 1764, the Lunar Society (so named because they met for dinner on the Monday night near-
est the full moon; they called themselves the “Lunatics”) was formed in Birmingham and
promoted new scientific and technological ideas. The original founders included Erasmus
Darwin (Charles Darwin’s grandfather), William Small (Jefferson’s mentor), and the indus-
trialist Matthew Boulton. Soon the “Lunatics” included many of the great minds in Britain
(including Benjamin Franklin when he visited). In Scotland, the brilliant men who met in
Edinburgh and Glasgow pubs included the philosopher David Hume (discussed in chapter 2),
the pioneering economist Adam Smith (the “father of capitalism”), the inventor of the first
practical steam engine, James Watt, and the father of modern geology, James Hutton. Even-
tually, these new ideas and challenges to royal authority helped lead to the American Revo-
lution against Britain in 1775. American patriots such as Jefferson were inspired largely by
British and French political philosophers, such as Locke and Rousseau. These ideas also
triggered the French Revolution in 1787, which overthrew the centuries-long domination of
France by the Bourbon monarchy and the church.
The Enlightenment had the greatest effect on natural history in France, where Buffon
had proposed daring nonbiblical ideas as early as 1749. The foremost French naturalist of
the late 1700s was Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Monet, the chevalier de Lamarck (1744–1829).
He began his career as a Linnaean-style botanist, but when the French Revolution swept
through the king’s gardens (les Jardins du Roi), he was reassigned to study the less glamor-
ous “insects, shells, and worms,” which had been neglected by naturalists for centuries.
Lamarck soon revolutionized invertebrate zoology, laying out the foundation of our modern
understanding of these “spineless wonders.” Because he had started as a botanist, he soon
recognized that zoology and botany made an integrated whole, which he named “biology.”
His ideas culminated in 1809 with the publication of Philosophie Zoologique.
In this work, Lamarck points out how all of life is highly variable and interconnected,
not composed of discrete fixed species from the original Creation. He arranged animals
in the traditional “scale of nature” (scala naturae) from the primitive sea jellies and corals
to worms to mollusks and insects to vertebrates, with humans at the top of the scale. In
some versions, the upper rungs of the “ladder of nature” were occupied by divine beings,
with the ranks of cherubim, seraphim, angels, and archangels culminating in God. Like
many people of his time, Lamarck believed that life was constantly being spontaneously