Podcast: Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas (LS 69 · TOP 0.05% what is this?)
Episode: 348 | Jessica Riskin on Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Life as Creative Agency
Pub date: 2026-03-23

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"Lamarkism" is a term often attached to a seemingly discredited idea in evolutionary biology: that one organism could acquire characteristics (e.g., becoming stronger through exercise) that would then be inherited by its descendants. This is a different story than the one ultimately told by the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology, according to which inheritance passes through our genome (which doesn't know that we've been working out). In her book The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, historian of science Jessica Riskin argues that this picture is too simple, and that Lamarck made contributions we should still pay attention to: most significantly, the idea that organisms have a creative agency of their own, in addition to the influences of the outside world.

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Jessica Riskin received her Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. Among her awards are the Patrick Suppes Prize in the History of Science and the J. Russell Major Award for French history. Her books include The Restless Clock and Genesis Redux, and she is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books.

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