Free The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen Page A

“At last gleams of light have come,” Darwin wrote, “& I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.”
    This was a daring admission, cast in sheepish understatement, and contradicting one of the fundamental tenets of British natural theology. Truth be told, he was more than “almost” convinced.
    Less famous is the disclaimer he added immediately: “Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a ‘tendency to progression’ ‘adaptations from the slow willing of animals’ &c.” He was trying to distance himself from the discredited ideas of one particular precursor, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Darwin knew well that his theory, besides being unsavory, might too easily be confused with other unsavory transmutationist notions that even he considered worthless.
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    Historians of biology have found intimations of evolutionary thinking in the works of philosophers and scientists long before Darwin. Books have been written tracking the concept back as far as Aristotle. Some of those early statements referred not to biological transmutation but to loosely parallel matters of cosmology and geology, such as the progressive physical history (from stardust to molten gob to rocky sphere) of planet Earth. Some involved the question of life’s ultimate origin. Some were more closely related to evolution in the modern sense—that is, assertions about the diversity and classification of species, about continuity within that diversity, or about the tricky issue of just what a species is.
    During the eighteenth century in France, for example, Maupertuis tossed forth the idea that vast numbers of living things come into existence by spontaneous generation, of which only a small fraction prove to be well organized enough for survival. Buffon articulated the hypothesis that apes, humans, horses, asses, and all other animals might be related by common descent—and then, having made it sound half-plausible, he backed away from that hypothesis. Diderot published dreamy speculations about living matter, generated in simple form but with a mystical sort of awareness, somehow assembling itself into complex creatures. In Germany, an anthropologist named J. F. Blumenbach studied skulls and suggested that the various races of humans had diversified from common stock in response to local conditions. In England, near the end of the century, Erasmus Darwin published his Zoonomia , with its casual suggestion about “one living filament” from which every sort of warm-blooded animal had arisen. All these bold musings added to an atmosphere of alternate possibility, offering at least some encouragement to anyone inclined toward challenging the rigidly scripture-based dogmas of creation. The likelihood of such challenges also increased with the arrival of new data: specimens and accounts of strange, unexpected species in remote places, sent back from the journeys of exploration and imperial conquest; volumes of biogeographical information, showing that new species and familiar ones are distributed around the planet in curious patterns; more and more fossils unearthed, revealing episodes of extinction and succession over time; the discovery, through microscope lenses, of tiny creatures swimming in every drop of pond water and saliva; the intricate adaptations seen in so many species; and the accumulating evidence of variation within species as well as differences among species. Despite all the restless speculation and all the new data, though, no one had proposed a comprehensive theory of evolution until, at the turn of the century, Lamarck did.
    His full name was Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, reflecting a family lineage that gave him trappings of nobility but no inheritance. At age seventeen he dropped out of a Jesuit seminary and joined the army. After a taste of war and a try at