Abstract
According to the dominant interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory beginning around the turn of the 20th century, the evolving organism was strictly passive in the evolutionary process, able only to vary randomly and be acted upon by natural selection. There could be no “inheritance of acquired characteristics”: any change an organism underwent during its lifetime would end with that organism’s death and would not be passed on to its offspring. The advocates of this neo-Darwinist interpretation, such as the English evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley, rejected a competing view, which they associated with the Revolution- and Romantic-era French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, according to which organisms were constantly transforming themselves heritably and shaping the course of evolution. Darwin himself had adopted Lamarck’s idea that living organisms could change themselves heritably, but his leading followers eradicated all traces of it from mainstream biology. To make matters even more fraught, Lamarckian Darwinism became associated with Soviet Communism when the Soviet agronomist Trofim Lysenko promoted a fraudulent version of it during the 1940’s and the idea of “inheritance of acquired characteristics” became Stalinist orthodoxy for a couple decades. Julian Huxley was the architect of the “Modern Synthesis” uniting neo-Darwinist evolutionary theory with genetics. He was also a eugenicist who argued that Lamarckism was congenial to Stalin and his cronies because they were dogmatic egalitarians who didn’t want to accept the unavoidable implication of a genetics-based theory of inheritance: that people are innately unequal as a result of the random shuffling of genes. Rather than accept the scientific fact of human inequality, according to Huxley, the Communists clung to “Lamarckian” ideas that were “superstitions instead of legitimate scientific hypotheses.” This essay will examine the eugenic logic and Cold War ideology at the heart of neo-Darwinism and the evolutionary Modern Synthesis.
Biography
Jessica Riskin received her B.A. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. She taught at MIT before coming to Stanford, and has also taught at Iowa State University and at Sciences Po, Paris. Her research interests include early modern science, politics and culture and the history of scientific explanation.
Riskin is the author of Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (2002), which won the American Historical Association's J. Russell Major Prize for best book in English on any aspect of French history, and the editor of Genesis Redux: Essays in the History and Philosophy of Artificial Life (2007) and, with Mario Biagioli, of Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present (2012). She is also the author of The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Debate over What Makes Living Things Tick (2016), which won the 2021 Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science from the American Philosophical Society.