I was merely jesting at the refusal we (the French) had of Darwinian evolution, because we chauvinistically preferred Lamarck. The text on the statue is basically this: the (childish) attempt of French biologists at making Lamarck rather than Darwin the true hero of the story.
But, yeah if I need to support my take, I don’t think he can be called the “father of the doctrine of evolution”. First, because “evolution” is a term strongly associated with Darwinism, rather than “transformism”. The former is a radical version of the latter, whereby all species come from a common ancestor, which is not at all Larmack’s view. Second, Lamarck wasn’t the first transformist, many other people suggested species could (like Buffon, although he was very careful about it, or… Erasmus Darwin). What he was, certainly, was the first to provide an auto-cohesive transformist theory. The problem was, his theory was most just that, auto-cohesive. Lamarck lacked Darwin drive to anchor his theory firmly into biological facts, and Darwin actually had little consideration for Lamarck’s work because of that. He certainly didn’t “build” on Lamarck, this is has been made quite clear by historians. This would be my third point.
A last thing is that I see a lot Lamarck associated with inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he’s not. Or, rather, it’s nothing specific to Lamarck. It was a very common thing to assume at the time, and Darwin’s theory of heredity (pangenesis) was compatible with inheritance of acquired characteristics. And Lamarck’s theory bears little with modern epigenetics (or rather this idea of environmentally-induced epigenetic inheritance which we call “neo-lamarckism” for reasons beyond me), because it was not the environment that induces change for Lamarck, but an internal driving force akin to a habit.
I was merely jesting at the refusal we (the French) had of Darwinian evolution, because we chauvinistically preferred Lamarck. The text on the statue is basically this: the (childish) attempt of French biologists at making Lamarck rather than Darwin the true hero of the story.
But, yeah if I need to support my take, I don’t think he can be called the “father of the doctrine of evolution”. First, because “evolution” is a term strongly associated with Darwinism, rather than “transformism”. The former is a radical version of the latter, whereby all species come from a common ancestor, which is not at all Larmack’s view. Second, Lamarck wasn’t the first transformist, many other people suggested species could (like Buffon, although he was very careful about it, or… Erasmus Darwin). What he was, certainly, was the first to provide an auto-cohesive transformist theory. The problem was, his theory was most just that, auto-cohesive. Lamarck lacked Darwin drive to anchor his theory firmly into biological facts, and Darwin actually had little consideration for Lamarck’s work because of that. He certainly didn’t “build” on Lamarck, this is has been made quite clear by historians. This would be my third point.
A last thing is that I see a lot Lamarck associated with inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he’s not. Or, rather, it’s nothing specific to Lamarck. It was a very common thing to assume at the time, and Darwin’s theory of heredity (pangenesis) was compatible with inheritance of acquired characteristics. And Lamarck’s theory bears little with modern epigenetics (or rather this idea of environmentally-induced epigenetic inheritance which we call “neo-lamarckism” for reasons beyond me), because it was not the environment that induces change for Lamarck, but an internal driving force akin to a habit.