The Life-Made World of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

During the reign of mechanism in science, beginning around the mid-seventeenth century, a curious gulf separated the resources of scientific explanation—sharply restricted, at least in principle, to moving bits of quality-less matter—and the dynamic plethora of living nature. Stephen Gaukroger characterized this situation by writing that “the explanandum had to be tailored and radically reduced to accommodate the minimal explanatory resources allowed in mechanism.” In particular, the rules of mechanist science precluded ascribing agency of any kind to natural objects, including living beings. And yet empirically—and the promulgators of mechanist science also embraced empiricism—looking around the world, one sees living beings everywhere behaving with apparent purposefulness. Gaukroger mentioned the French Revolution- and Romantic-era naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck as an example of someone who rejected the mechanist strictures. Lamarck was a founder of the field of biology—he in fact coined the term—and author of the first theory of evolution. This essay takes up his alternative mode of science—not mechanist but epistemically pluralist, not reductive but narrative—and the productive challenge it posed to mechanist science.