A few decades earlier than the arrival of “Origins”, the French naturalist and evolutionist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) had strongly promoted radical evolutionary ideas in a series of books claiming that all species, including man, had somehow descended, without divine intervention, from other, earlier species -- and ultimately from lifeless matter.

Lamarck, who was described by Darwin as “the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention”, was the first person to present evolutionary ideas in a systematic form—supported by what was regarded at the time as convincing evidence, even proof.

Although Darwin’s theory of evolution was totally different, as we saw earlier, few people seem to be aware that he did not reject Lamarck’s ideas out of hand -- but simply regarded Natural Selection as the major and more important mechanism at work.

Lamarck’s Signature
However, although the scientific community did later totally reject Lamarck’s ideas, Darwin having won the day, modern reference works show that his “dead” theory refuses to lie down. In fact, in their book “Lamarck’s Signature”, researchers Steele, Lindley and Blanden assure us that Lamarck’s ideas work well in explaining how animal populations acquire immunity to disease.

As a result, they strongly dispute the views of Darwin’s modern disciple, Richard Dawkins, who seems to out-Darwin Darwin in maintaining that evolution occurs by Natural Selection exclusively, and that all the mind-boggling complexity of nature has arisen by the accidental accumulation of random blind chance DNA copying errors.

Like Darwin, Lamarck had studied for the Christian ministry in his youth, but on the death of his father he left the Jesuits seminary at Amiens and joined the army, later developing an interest in botany and biology – later still becoming the first person to distinguish “vertebrate” from “invertebrate” animals in classification, and one of the very first to apply the term “biology” to the study of living things.

An Atheistic Theory
Unlike Darwin, however, Lamarck’s more elaborate and totally atheistic theory of evolution sought to explain the ultimate origins of life itself, not just how variation might lead from one new species to the next.

Lamarck was said to have a vivid imagination, which, combined with an almost total ignorance of what he was talking about, led him to naively claim that “life” was created by “spontaneous generation – easily conceived as resulting from such agencies as heat and electricity causing in small gelatinous bodies a singular tension”. [ Ed: Jus’ like that, G-Man, jus’ like that!]

Having so easily disposed of the minor problem of the origin of “life”, Lamarck then went on to propose four laws by the agency of which, he claimed, modern organisms had arisen from those imaginary “small gelatinous bodies in singular tension”:

1) Life naturally tends to increase the volume of any body possessing it.
2) The creation of a new organ in an animal body arises from a need.
3) Organs develop to the extent they are used.
4) All that has been acquired or changed in the organization of an individual is passed on to the next generation.

Although Lamarck could offer no explanation of how these processes worked, his observations of the way nature actually operates are increasingly being found to be accurate, and, as such, more sensible than Darwin’s speculations of evolutionary change by means of the steady accumulation of minute variations over thousands of millions of years, accompanied by a steady flow of unfit rejects onto the compost pile of palaeontology.

Notice two key ideas in Larmarck’s list:

1) The physiology of organisms can vary, generation by generation, in response to the needs or pressure of their environment, implying some kind of feedback mechanism as work – the famous “inheritance of acquired characteristics” theory,

2) Over generations, unused organisms can atrophy and be lost, and new ones acquired according to need – the famous “use and disuse” theory.

Although the mutational processes by which such real and observed micro-evolutionary variations occur are still not understood, it seems increasingly likely that such adaptive mechanisms have been engineered into all organisms – thereby equipping the original Genesis “kinds” with the ability, generation by generation, to colonize the corners of the planet and meet the needs of mankind.

Evolutionist Derek Hough’s “Self-developing Genome” is just such a mechanism. [Ed: Right on, G-Man, but doesn’t Derek also claim the first genome arrived on earth on a Number 47 bus – sorry, I mean a comet? I suspect he was misquoting the great Francis Crick, the chap who worked out the architecture of the DNA molecule.]

How the Giraffe Got His Long Neck
Thus, we are often told, Lamarck claimed that the giraffe’s neck became elongated by generations of stretching to reach high foliage on tall trees [Ed: Come off it, G-Man. You know very well he didn’t actually say that!], and that the kangaroo’s front legs, conversely, shrank from generations of disuse when it acquired the habit of sitting upright to carry its young in its pouch -- two classic examples of “acquired characteristics” being “inherited” and passed on from one generation to the next.

Lamarck’s “Just So Story” kind of speculations were, of course, simplistic in the extreme. As Gordon Rattray Taylor points out in “The Great Evolution Mystery”, Lamarck’s imaginary primitive giraffe with its newly extended neck would have immense problems breathing, having to suck sufficient fresh air into the lungs via a narrow eight-foot tube and also discharge the carbon dioxide by the same route without suffocating in the process. Another problem would be that of dangerously high blood pressure in its head when bending down. Taylor goes on to describe some of the astonishing design features by which “evolution” supposedly solved these problems, one of which involves the presence of a special high pressure fluid between the giraffe’s body cells. [Ed: Why don’t we run the standing ovation tape again, G-Man?]

Taylor’s point is that all this “evolutionary” change required multiple cunningly coordinated mutations to make it possible. Dismissing Lamarck’s theory as inadequate nonsense, and in a neat reversal, Taylor suggests that the real reason a giraffe has or needs a long neck is because it has such long legs, and actually spends far more time grazing low down off the ground rather than off tall trees. And since the female’s neck is some two feet shorter than the male’s anyway, the suggestion that the long neck was crucial to survival was also nonsense. [Ed: Was Taylor really an evolutionist, G-Man? You’re having us on!]

The Evolutionary Scrap Heap
Although Lamarck’s theory was later discarded, partly because of famous incident of research studies being foolishly falsified by a Soviet scientist who wanted to support it for political reasons, it still refuses to go away, especially in the field of acquired immunity to disease, as already noted.

Notice, however, a crucial difference between the theories of Lamarck and Darwin. Although Darwin required Natural Selection to reject innumerable intermediate, unfit forms and “missing links” and chuck them on the evolutionary scrap heap -- Lamarck. postulated the emergence of only meaningful, holistic changes in response to the needs of the environment.

Lamarck’s concept of the way nature works therefore matched much better with the facts of the fossil record, and indeed the principles of G-.Theory, which allows limited constructive variation, within the boundaries of the original Genesis “kinds”.

Notice, however, that Lamarck and Darwin did both share the same elementary and unscientific error of extrapolating observed, limit-ed variation to limit-less infinity, in order to make macro-evolution a possibility.

Incidentally, the Soviet scientist mentioned above, Trofin Lysenko, rejected Darwinism and believed that just as organisms could actively adapt to the needs of their environment as according to Lamarck’s theory, so citizens could adapt themselves to the needs of the Soviet State. [Ed: Did you know, G-Man, that Lysenko was so scornful of genetic research being carried out on fruit flies by hopeful Darwinians that when he became director of the Moscow Genetic Institute, he had them all boiled to death—the fruit flies, that is, not the Darwinians. A kind of purge, I suppose.]

Pangenesis
Some ten years after the publication of his original work, Darwin was forced to accept that Natural Selection simply could not credibly account for a whole range of complex phenomena, from the sexual and asexual reproduction of plants, let alone human beings. Another difficulty was the sudden reappearance of traits supposedly bred out of organisms generations earlier.

As a result , in a later publication he freely admitted that he had put too much stress on Natural Selection as a mechanism, and that an additional idea was needed. He called it “Pangenesis”

Pangenesis appears to have been Darwin’s attempt to refine Lamarck’s four laws into a formal theory. As they stood, Lamarck’s so-called theory simply asserted that characteristics acquired by organisms could somehow be assimilated into their “organization” and so passed on to their offspring—but no actual cause-and-effect mechanism by which that could occur was suggested. What the brilliant, analytical Darwin did was to devise a remarkably modern-sounding scheme by which such feedback could conceivably take place.

According to Pangenesis ( the prefix “pan” means “everywhere” or “in all parts”), each and every part of an organism generates minute “gemmules” or “pangenes which flow around the body carrying information of any changes, such as the disuse of the eyes by a mole living underground, for example, back to sex cells which then respond by creating in the next generation a few suitably modified offspring that Natural Selection can then get to work on—thereby generating a new population more suitably adapted to their working environment, e.g. blind moles in this case.

Notice, however, that although the moles become blind, the genetic potential to restore vision somehow lingers on. In fact, parallel experiments have been conducted with fast-breeding fruit flies, demonstrating that very reversion effect. [Ed:You’re your know, G-Man, that “White Mice Day” occurs every April 1 – a time when white mice everywhere celebrate the fact that, due to a dramatically shorter gestation period, fruit flies are now the preferred victims of interesting scientific investigations rather than them. Cheese consumption usually doubles that day.]

I suspect that part of the appeal of Pangenesis to Darwin was that it envisioned organisms actively responding to their environment – a much less passive, and potentially faster-acting mechanism than Natural Selection which had to wait for “deep time” to discover and accumulate a series useful variations for it to work on.
Of course, what Darwin was suggesting with Pangenesis implied even greater inner complexity in organism than ever before – and how the pangenes ever evolved in the fist place, he naturally had no idea.

A Genetic Chastity Belt
In modern terminology, what both Lamarck and Darwin in his second theory claimed was that organisms contain a sophisticated feedback mechanism whereby their genetic structure can somehow respond creatively to the pressure and needs of the environment – which is precisely what G-Theory teaches.

However, according to current evolutionary orthodoxy, such feedback is totally impossible, being forbidden by the “Weismann barrier”, which supposedly prevents any communication of information from normal body cells back to the sex or “germ” cells of an organism – thereby making Lamarck’s idea of the passing on of “acquired characteristics” from one generation to the next an absolute no-no. The influential Weismann apparently said just that, Quote: “It is impossible!” [Ed: I bet it sounded better in German, G-Man!]

Some scientists now describe the “Weismann barrier”, which was simply a rule or convenient assumption anyway, as a “genetic chastity belt” around the sex cells, but one that is “selectively permeable”, given the right circumstances. And so another scientific assumption bites the dust. [Ed: Didn’t Freddie Mercury write that one for Queen?]

The Fingerprint Genius
One of the opponents of Pangenesis was Darwin’s clever cousin, genius Francis Galton, the inventor of finger printing.

According to Pangenesis, the units of heredity that Darwin called pangenes were carried around the body in the blood, Seeking to disprove the theory, Galton took different colours of rabbits and swapped their blood [Ed: And also their pangenes, I assume, G-Man?] by transfusions before then breeding them to find out what colour their offspring would be as a result. As Galton predicted, the transfusions had absolutely no effect – other than presenting Darwin with yet another headache.

The accepted theory of heredity in Darwin’s day was that of “blending”, and Galton’s own particular version claimed that offspring received 25% from each parent and 12.5% from each grandparent. The consequent implication of blending was that interbreeding would soon dilute and destroy any new variation arising in an organism, like mixing coloured paints together. This objection was a major problem for Darwin and was one more reason for his interest in Pangenesis. Another problem for Darwin was the fact that, according to Robin Hennig, he was virtually innumerate and completely unable to understand Galton’s mathematical theories of heredity anyway.

Little did Darwin know that even as he struggled with this problem, the monk Gregor Mendel had already proved that genetic traits are either inherited or not inherited, digital fashion, 0 or 1 as in computer code, and do not become blended. . [Ed: I’m still a bit confused G-Man, because I read somewhere that more recent research has shown that in some organisms the traits do get blended – which is probably why those guys latched onto that idea in the first place!]