The Evolution of Evolution 97generated out of the mud. Once formed into sea jellies, life would be transformed and move
up the ladder, so that lineages that had originated long ago had already climbed to the higher
rungs of fish or mammals or humans.
This “ladder of nature” notion from the late 1700s is still a common misconception
that leads to all sorts of philosophical and biological absurdities. We will talk more about
this topic in the next chapter, but the main point is that the concept of the ladder has been
replaced by the metaphor of the bushy, branching “family tree of life.”
Although Lamarck’s ideas were evolutionary, they were not very similar to modern
concepts of evolution. Instead of the bushy family tree of life we now recognize, Lamarck’s
concept was that of many different “blades of grass” independently arising by spontaneous
generation out of the mud and climbing the ladder of complexity and not interconnected by
common ancestry. Typical of the works of its time, Philosophie Zoologique was highly specu-
lative and philosophical and not supported by much hard evidence from nature or experi-
mental data. A minor idea in Lamarck’s book was the inheritance of acquired characters. Like
most people of that time (including Charles Darwin 50 years later), Lamarck believed that
the characteristics that you developed during your lifetime (such as the muscles of a black-
smith or a bodybuilder) could be passed directly to your offspring. According to Lamarck,
the giraffe would keep stretching and stretching its neck and pass those improvements to its
descendants until they all had long necks. After Lamarck’s death, this idea was lampooned
by his enemies as “Lamarckism” or “Lamarckian inheritance” (even though Charles Darwin
believed it, too). Consequently, most of Lamarck’s great achievements are largely forgotten,
and his name is now attached to a minor part of his ideas that has become disreputable.
The Evolution of Darwin
In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring
struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.
—Charles Darwin, On the Origin of SpeciesCharles Darwin (fig. 4.1) was born on the same date as Abraham Lincoln (but about 15 hours
earlier)—February 12, 1809. Like Lincoln, he was a liberating force for humankind, but
instead of freeing people from slavery, he freed biology from the bondage of supernatural-
ism. Philosophers of science have long pointed to Darwinian evolution as the greatest scien-
tific revolution within biology, comparable to the role of Isaac Newton’s or Albert Einstein’s
revolutionary ideas in physics or the plate tectonics revolution in geology. Before Darwin, it
was possible (although increasingly difficult) to see nature as divinely created as we see it,
unchanged over thousands of years. After Darwin, all of life was subject to natural law, just
as Newton had shown that the stars and planets followed natural laws and did not require
God to move them. As Sigmund Freud (1917) commented,
In the course of centuries the naïve self-love of men has had to submit to two major
blows at the hands of science. The first was when they learnt that our earth was not the
center of the universe but only a tiny fragment of a cosmic system of scarcely imagin-
able vastness. This is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus, though
something similar had already been asserted by Alexandrian science. The second blow