172 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
series of experiments, M. de Lamarck, without attempting experiment, and
destitute of the means of doing so, imagined that he had discovered another"
(1832, 1984 edition, p. 442).
After ridiculing Lamarck's general method of system building, Cuvier
mounted his second attack and dismembered the particular content of Lamarck's
system, especially his evolutionary views. Cuvier did his former colleague a lasting
disservice by caricaturing Lamarckian evolution, as the outcome of organic will,
based on desires, translated into phyletic progress. Cuvier's rhetoric was brilliant,
his characterization grossly distorted:
Wants and desires, produced by circumstances, will lead to other efforts,
which will produce other organs. ... It is the desire and the attempt to swim
that produces membranes in the feet of aquatic birds; wading in the water,
and at the same time the desire to avoid wet, has lengthened the legs of
such as frequent the sides of rivers... These principles once admitted, it
will easily be perceived that nothing is wanting but time and circumstances
to enable a monad or a polypus gradually and indifferently to transform
themselves into a frog, a stork, or an elephant (1832, 1984 edition, p. 446).Finally, in an ultimate dismissal from a "hard" scientist (and with the tone of the
Yahoo), Cuvier concludes: "A system established on such foundations may amuse
the imagination of a poet; a metaphysician may derive from it an entirely new
series of systems; but it cannot for a moment bear the examination of anyone who
has dissected a hand ... or even a feather" (1832, 1984 edition, p. 447).
Cuvier's caricature remains potent in our worst modern misunderstanding of
Lamarck as a mystical vitalist, advancing the idea of an ineffable organic will
against the ordinary physical causality of science. (Tit for tat, and however
unfairly, Lyell hurt Cuvier even more in return by caricaturing him as a
theologically tainted, antiscientific catastrophist in geology.) But Lamarck,
schooled (along with Cuvier) in the ideals of the French Enlightenment, was an
ardent materialist. His idiosyncratic and unfruitful views about the nature of matter
(arising primarily from his anti-Lavoisierian chemistry) led to predictions of odd
behavior for living bodies, but his basic notions of reduction and causality
remained in the scientific mainstream. In his last great work, and in the context of
his evolutionary theory, Lamarck defended a conventional view of mechanistic
causality, and derided all teleological interpretations. Goals, he argued, are false
appearances reflecting an underlying causal necessity:
It is chiefly among the living, and most notably among Animals, that some
have claimed to glimpse a purpose in nature's operations. Even in this case
the purpose is mere appearance, not reality. Indeed, in every type of animal
organism, there subsists an order of things ... whose only effect is to lead to
what seems to us to be a goal, but is essentially a necessity. The order
achieves this necessity through the progressive development