Lamarck shouldn't be so La-Marked

 Anybody who's taken a basic biology class learned about Jean Baptiste Lamarck - whether they remember it or not. Lamarck, like Darwin, proposed a theory of evolution. But unlike most scientists we learn about in school, Lamarck didn't get famous for being right. He got famous for being wrong. 

Really, though, we need to cut Lamarck some slack. He was the first person to even conceptualize the idea that organisms might change through time. And he did his work in 1801, when we knew jack-all about real science. I mean, people still thought cocaine made a good medicine. The first fossil collections were just getting started. Creation myths and religion reigned supreme over logical thought. Can we blame Lamarck for getting a few things wrong?

Okay, so what exactly did Lamarck get wrong? Well, first we should talk about what he got right. 

Lamarck was the first person to formally theorize that life is not fixed - an impressive statement considering that most people of the time hardcore believed in the literal interpretation of the Bible's creation myth. So. One point to Lamarck, for not being a basic b****. 

Lamarck also proposed what causes life to change: their environment. Lamarck theorized that organisms change when their environment changes, and that these changes help an organism better survive in their altered environment. This was basically the first theory of adaptation, so...Two points to Lamarck!

And then Lamarck suggested that a man could grow wings by throwing himself off a building and trying to fly. 

Okay, not really. "Man can fly is he really wants to" is an exaggerated version of Lamarck's theory for how evolution happens - which, if you couldn't tell, he got wrong. Lamarck theorized that an organism changed when its environment forced it to use its features in a novel way. For instance, if trees grew taller, giraffes would make their necks slightly longer by continuous stretching. Their offspring would then get longer necks, and then stretch their necks even higher. Over several generations, the small stretches would accumulate to make the neck several feet longer. Thus, through continuous and novel use, giraffes got longs necks. 

It's easy to laugh at this theory, but I'd say it was pretty damn good for Lamarck's time. Remember - cocaine medicine. Lamarck correctly identified that most changes happen in small increments over time, rather than in massive shifts. He also correctly identified that traits needs to be passed on to subsequent generations, or the change would be restricted to the first organism it appears in. That's two more points for Lamarck right there.

So really, the only thing our dear Lamarck missed the target with was how changes come about. Changes don't happen because of need in an organism's life, but spontaneously in their genetic code before their birth. It's other forces that drive some mutations forward and keep other changes back. When you put yourself in Lamarck's 19th-centaury shoes, it's pretty easy to see why he got this wrong - no one had discovered genes or methods of inheritance! That wouldn't come until 1865, when Gregor Mendel (a monk with a serious pea passion) published his discovery of "heritable factors" in pea plants. Even then, it took a while for Mendel's work to be connected to the theory of evolution. Looking back on it all, Lamarck got a lot more right than he got wrong. 

Well...kind of. Lamarck got some other things wrong, too. He believed that evolution was gearing organisms from "simpler forms" to "more complex forms", when we know today that evolution just prompts organisms to survive and reproduce in whatever form is best suited for the job. He also argued that life had many "starting points", as evidenced by the existence of microbes, who hadn't yet had the chance to evolve into "more complex forms." Today we know that life had a single point of origin - and we see evidence for that in the identical genetic code every living thing carries. 

But despite the cocaine medicine and religious confusion, Lamarck still got four points - and that's more than I honestly expected from a guy who thought fashion involved high-waisted tights and top hats. While I do love laughing at some of his ideas, Lamarck gets more derision than he deserves. 

I man, come on. I'd hate for my mistakes to be immortalized forever.