2.1 A Lamarckian Starting Point
Last modified 07/04/2008
|
If Darwin's theory was an oversimplification it might be necessary or
useful to backtrack to the generation before to examine, as it were, cultural the
'reserve dna' of theories that crisscrossed a generation of thinkers in the
Enlightenment and after. And there we find a spectrum of views that were
'deselected' in the wake of Darwin, from issues of teleology, to questions of
progress, to the milieu of philosophy, to the facts of embryology, that, as we
have seen, constituted a key component of the puzzle.
And there we see a considerable portrait of the culture of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, German classical philosophy, and much else, from the ideology of the Industrial Revolution, visible in Darwin's ancestor Erasmus Darwin, to the leftist champions of evolution in the wake of the tide of revolution. And there in that reserve dna we find the figure Lamarck whose thinking clearly anticipates the needs of a theory of evolution in its delineation of two levels or kinds of evolution. Unfortunately, Lamarck's reputation has been saddled with his attempt to provide a theory of adaptation, the 'neck of the giraffe' theme, that has obscured his more important insight, first that evolution is a reality, but that its action comprises two aspects or levels. Here we see the birth of the 'macro/micro' distinction, and the real birth, however inchoate, of the first real theory of evolution, however difficult it might be to work with.
|
||
|
|
||
|
|
||