The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

In this fresh reconsideration, Stanford history professor Riskin (The Restless Clock) reevaluates the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 18th-century French naturalist who was castigated for his claim that organisms’ acquired characteristics can be passed down to their offspring. Rejecting his family’s wish that he become a priest, Lamarck joined the French army during the Seven Years’ War. While stationed in Provence, he discovered his love of plants and began studying botany. Riskin takes readers through Lamarck’s discoveries, particularly “the idea that living things continually create and recreate themselves, one another, and the world around them.” Seen as dismissive of God and divine creation, his ideas were largely rejected until nearly two centuries later with the emergence of epigenetics, the study of how behaviors and environments can cause heritable changes in how genes are expressed. Riskin also highlights Lamarck’s many other contributions to science, including his coining of the term biology and development of a classification system for cloud formations. Effectively explaining how her subject’s thoughts on evolution were twisted by his detractors into a caricature of what he originally intended, Riskin concludes that, in many ways, “Lamarck was right.” Historians and scientists will find much to savor. (Mar.)