by John Carey
Lamarck really held as his fundamental proposition that living organisms changed because they wanted to. As he stated it, the great factor in Evolution is use and disuse. If you have no eyes, and want to see, and keep trying to see, you will finally get eyes. If, like a mole or a subterranean fish, you have eyes and don’t want to see, you will lose your eyes. If you like eating the tender tops of trees enough to make you concentrate all your energies on the stretching of your neck, you will finally get a long neck, like the giraffe. This seems absurd to inconsiderate people at the first blush; but it is within the personal experience of all of us that it is just by this process that a child tumbling about the floor becomes a boy walking erect; and that a man sprawling on the road with a bruised chin, or supine on the ice with a bashed occiput, becomes a bicyclist and a skater. The process is not continuous, as it would be if mere practice had anything to do with it; for though you may improve at each bicycling lesson during the lesson, when you begin your next lesson you do not begin at the point at which you left off: you relapse apparently to the beginning. Finally, you succeed quite suddenly, and do not relapse again. More miraculous still, you at once exercise the new power unconsciously. Although you are adapting your front wheel to your balance so elaborately and actively that the accidental locking of your handle bars for a second will throw you off; though five minutes before you could not do it at all, yet now you do it as unconsciously as you grow your finger nails. You have a new faculty, and must have created some new bodily tissue as its organ. And you have done it solely by willing. For here there can be no question of Circumstantial Selection, or the survival of the fittest. The man who is learning how to ride a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for existence: quite the contrary. He has acquired a new habit, an automatic unconscious habit, solely because he wanted to, and kept trying until it was added unto him.
But when your son tries to skate or bicycle in his turn, he does not pick up the accomplishment where you left it, any more than he is born six feet high with a beard and a tall hat. The set-back that occurred between your lessons occurs again. The race learns exactly as the individual learns. Your son relapses, not to the very beginning, but to a point which no mortal method of measurement can distinguish from the beginning. Now this is odd; for certain other habits of yours, equally acquired (to the Evolutionist, of course, all habits are acquired), equally unconscious, equally automatic, are transmitted without any perceptible relapse. For instance, the very first act of your son when he enters the world as a separate individual is to yell with indignation: that yell which Shakespear thought the most tragic and piteous of all sounds. In the act of yelling he begins to breathe: another habit, and not even a necessary one, as the object of breathing can be achieved in other ways, as by deep sea fishes. He circulates his blood by pumping it with his heart. He demands a meal, and proceeds at once to perform the most elaborate chemical operations on the food he swallows. He manufactures teeth; discards them; and replaces them with fresh ones. Compared to these habitual feats, walking, standing upright, and bicycling are the merest trifles; yet it is only by going through the wanting, trying process that he can stand, walk, or cycle, whereas in the other and far more difficult and complex habits he not only does not consciously want nor consciously try, but actually consciously objects very strongly. Take that early habit of cutting the teeth: would he do that if he could help it? Take that later habit of decaying and eliminating himself by death – equally an acquired habit, remember – how he abhors it! Yet the habit has become so rooted, so automatic, that he must do it in spite of himself, even to his own destruction.
We have here a routine which, given time enough for it to operate, will finally produce the most elaborate forms of organized life on Lamarckian lines without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection at all. If you can turn a pedestrian into a cyclist, and a cyclist into a pianist or violinist, without the intervention of Circumstantial Selection, you can turn an amœba into a man, or a man into a superman, without it. All of which is rank heresy to the Neo-Darwinian, who imagines that if you stop Circumstantial Selection, you not only stop development but inaugurate a rapid and disastrous degeneration.
Let us fix the Lamarckian evolutionary process well in our minds. You are alive; and you want to be more alive. You want an extension of consciousness and of power. You want, consequently, additional organs, or additional uses of your existing organs: that is, additional habits. You get them because you want them badly enough to keep trying for them until they come. Nobody knows how: nobody knows why: all we know is that the thing actually takes place. We relapse miserably from effort to effort until the old organ is modified or the new one created, when suddenly the impossible becomes possible and the habit is formed. The moment we form it we want to get rid of the consciousness of it so as to economize our consciousness for fresh conquests of life; as all consciousness means preoccupation and obstruction. If we had to think about breathing or digesting or circulating our blood we should have no attention to spare for anything else, as we find to our cost when anything goes wrong with these operations. We want to be unconscious of them just as we wanted to acquire them; and we finally win what we want. But we win unconsciousness of our habits at the cost of losing our control of them; and we also build one habit and its corresponding functional modification of our organs on another, and so become dependent on our old habits. Consequently we have to persist in them even when they hurt us. We cannot stop breathing to avoid an attack of asthma, or to escape drowning. We can lose a habit and discard an organ when we no longer need them, just as we acquired them; but this process is slow and broken by relapses; and relics of the organ and the habit long survive its utility. And if other and still indispensable habits and modifications have been built on the ones we wish to discard, we must provide a new foundation for them before we demolish the old one. This is also a slow process and a very curious one.
The relapses between the efforts to acquire a habit are important because, as we have seen, they recur not only from effort to effort in the case of the individual, but from generation to generation in the case of the race. This relapsing from generation to generation is an invariable characteristic of the evolutionary process. For instance, Raphael, though descended from eight uninterrupted generations of painters, had to learn to paint apparently as if no Sanzio had ever handled a brush before. But he had also to learn to breathe, and digest, and circulate his blood. Although his father and mother were fully grown adults when he was conceived, he was not conceived or even born fully grown: he had to go back and begin as a speck of protoplasm, and to struggle through an embryonic lifetime, during part of which he was indistinguishable from an embryonic dog, and had neither a skull nor a backbone. When he at last acquired these articles, he was for some time doubtful whether he was a bird or a fish. He had to compress untold centuries of development into nine months before he was human enough to break loose as an independent being. And even then he was still so incomplete that his parents might well have exclaimed, ‘Good Heavens! have you learnt nothing from our experience that you come into the world in this ridiculously elementary state? Why can’t you talk and walk and paint and behave decently?’ To that question Baby Raphael had no answer. All he could have said was that this is how evolution or transformation happens. The time may come when the same force that compressed the development of millions of years into nine months may pack many more millions into even a shorter space; so that Raphaels may be born painters as they are now born breathers and blood circulators. But they will still begin as specks of protoplasm, and acquire the faculty of painting in their mother’s womb at quite a late stage of their embryonic life. They must recapitulate the history of mankind in their own persons, however briefly they may condense it.
Nothing was so astonishing and significant in the discoveries of the embryologists, nor anything so absurdly little appreciated, as this recapitulation, as it is now called: this power of hurrying up into months a
process which was once so long and tedious that the mere contemplation of it is unendurable by men whose span of life is three-score-and-ten. It widened human possibilities to the extent of enabling us to hope that the most prolonged and difficult operations of our minds may yet become instantaneous, or, as we call it, instinctive.
A more recent celebration of Lamarck is by the American poet Richard Wilbur who distinguishes between the senses (sight, hearing etc.), created by the real world, and the unreal worlds we imagine, following cosmic lyres/liars:
Lamarck Elaborated
‘The environment creates the organ’
The Greeks were wrong who said our eyes have rays;
Not from these sockets or these sparkling poles
Comes the illumination of our days.
It was the sun that bored these two blue holes.
It was the song of doves begot the ear
And not the ear that first conceived of sound:
That organ bloomed in vibrant atmosphere,
As music conjured Ilium from the ground.
The yielding water, the repugnant stone,
The poisoned berry and the flaring rose
Attired in sense the tactless finger-bone
And set the taste-buds and inspired the nose.
Out of our vivid ambiance came unsought
All sense but that most formidably dim.
The shell of balance rolls in seas of thought.
It was the mind that taught the head to swim.
Newtonian numbers set to cosmic lyres
Whelmed us in whirling worlds we could not know,
And by the imagined floods of our desires
The voice of Sirens gave us vertigo.
Sources: J. B. Lamarck, Zoological Philosophy, trans. Hugh Elliot, London, Macmillan, 1914. George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Back to Methuselah (Copyright Society of Authors, 84 Drayton Gardens, sw10). Richard Wilbur, Things of This World, New York, Harcourt Brace, 1956.
Medical Studies, Paris 1821
The composer Hector Berlioz (1803–69) had a brief spell as a medical student, until a visit to the Opera drew him irresistibly towards music. This is from his Memoirs.
On arriving in Paris in 1821 with my fellow-student Alphonse Robert, I gave myself up wholly to studying for the career which had been thrust upon me, and loyally kept the promise I had given my father on leaving. It was soon put to a somewhat severe test when Robert, having announced one morning that he had bought a ‘subject’ (a corpse), took me for the first time to the dissecting-room at the Hospice de la Pitié. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house – the fragments of limbs, the grinning faces and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae – such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting-room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels. The shock of that first impression lasted for twenty-four hours. I did not want to hear another word about anatomy, dissection or medicine, and I meditated a hundred mad schemes of escape from the future that hung over me.
Robert lavished his eloquence in a vain attempt to argue away my disgust and demonstrate the absurdity of my plans. In the end he got me to agree to make another effort. For the second time I accompanied him to the hospital and we entered the house of the dead. How strange! The objects which before had filled me with extreme horror had absolutely no effect upon me now. I felt nothing but a cold distaste; I was already as hardened to the scene as any seasoned medical student. The crisis was past. I found I actually enjoyed groping about in a poor fellow’s chest and feeding the winged inhabitants of the delightful place their ration of lung. ‘Hallo!’ Robert cried, laughing, ‘you’re getting civilized. “Thou giv’st the little birds their daily bread.”’ ‘“An o’er all nature’s realm my bounty spread,”’ I retorted, tossing a shoulder-blade to a great rat staring at me with famished eyes.
Source: The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, Member of the French Institute, including his travels in Italy, Germany, Russia and England, 1803–1865, trans, and ed. David Cairns, London, Cardinal, 1990.
The Man with a Lid on his Stomach
On 6 June 1822, at an army station in Michigan, an 18-year-old French Canadian, Alexis St Martin, was accidentally shot at close range. A US army surgeon, William Beaumont (1785–1853), who was called to the scene, describes the wound:
The charge, consisting of powder and duck shot, was received in the left side of the youth, he being at a distance of not more than one yard from the muzzle of the gun. The contents entered posteriorly, and in an oblique direction, forward and inward, literally blowing off integuments and muscles of the size of a man’s hand, fracturing and carrying away the anterior half of the sixth rib, fracturing the fifth, lacerating the lower portion of the left lobe of the lungs, the diaphragm, and perforating the stomach.
The whole mass of materials forced from the musket, together with fragments of clothing and pieces of fractured ribs, were driven into the muscles and cavity of the chest.
I saw him in twenty-five or thirty minutes after the accident occurred, and, on examination, found a portion of the lung, as large as a Turkey’s egg, protruding through the external wound, lacerated and burnt; and immediately below this, another protrusion, which, on further examination, proved to be a portion of the stomach, lacerated through all its coats, and pouring out the food he had taken for his breakfast, through an orifice large enough to admit the fore finger.
In attempting to return the protruded portion of the lung, I was prevented by a sharp point of the fractured rib, over which it had caught by its membranes; but by raising it with my finger, and clipping off the point of the rib, I was able to return it into its proper cavity, though it could not be retained there, on account of the incessant efforts to cough.
The projecting portion of the stomach was nearly as large as that of the lung. It passed through the lacerated diaphragm and external wound, mingling the food with the bloody mucus blown from the lungs.
Beaumont cleaned and dressed the wounds, after ‘replacing the stomach and lungs as far as practicable’, but he did not expect his patient to live. St Martin, however, was a tough young man, and he pulled through. At first he could not retain any food in his stomach, because of the hole in it, but, Beaumont reports, ‘firm dressings were applied and the contents of the stomach retained’.
Despite all Beaumont’s efforts, the hole in St Martin’s stomach would not heal completely. But gradually ‘a small fold or doubling of the coats of the stomach’ grew over and filled the aperture, forming a kind of valve which could be opened by hand. Beaumont, who nursed, fed and clothed St Martin for the first two years of his recovery, realized that he had at his disposal a walking laboratory for the experimental study of human digestion. He could place foodstuffs directly into St Martin’s stomach through the hole, and remove them at intervals to observe how much had been digested. As he later acknowledged:
I had opportunities for the examination of the interior of the stomach, and its secretions, which has never before been so fully offered to any one. This most important organ, its secretions and its operations, have been submitted to my observation in a very extraordinary manner, in a state of perfect health, and for years in succession.
The first experiment was carried out on 1 August, 1825:
At 12 o’clock I introduced through the perforation, into the stomach, the following articles of diet, suspended by a silk string, and fastened at proper distances, so as to pass in without pain – viz.: – a piece of high seasoned a la mode beef; a piece of raw, salted, fat pork; a piece of raw, salted, lean beef; a piece of boiled, salted beef; a piece of stale bread; and a bunch of raw, sliced cabbage; each piece weighing about two drachms; the lad continuing his usual employment about the house.
At 1 o’clock, p.m., withdrew and examined them – found the cabbage and bread abo
ut half digested: the pieces of meat unchanged. Returned them into the stomach.
At 2 o’clock, p.m., withdrew them again – found the cabbage, bread, pork, and boiled beef, all cleanly digested, and gone from the string; the other pieces of meat but very little affected. Returned them into the stomach again.
Over the next eight years Beaumont performed hundreds of similar experiments, gathering a vast amount of precise information about the speed or difficulty with which the stomach digests different types of food. He also established by direct observation the harmful effects of mental disturbance on digestion. During this whole period St Martin led an active, vigorous life, married and fathered four children, and became a sergeant in the US army. His comrades joked about ‘the man with a lid on his stomach’. However, he was able to make considerable sums by touring and showing his internal organs to interested doctors.
Besides watching food in St Martin’s stomach, Beaumont was able to extract gastric juice from it through a tube:
The usual method of extracting the gastric juice, for experiment, is by placing the subject on his right side, depressing the valve within the aperture, introducing a gum-elastic tube, of the size of a large quill, five or six inches into the stomach, and then turning him on the left side, until the orifice becomes dependent. In health, and when free from food, the stomach is usually entirely empty, and contracted upon itself. On introducing the tube, the fluid soon begins to flow, first by drops, then in an interrupted, and sometimes in a short continuous stream. Moving the tube about, up and down, or backwards and forwards, increases the discharge. The quantity of fluid ordinarily obtained is from four drachms to one and a half or two ounces, varying with the circumstances and condition of the stomach. Its extraction is generally attended by that peculiar sensation at the pit of the stomach, termed sinking, with some degree of faintness, which renders it necessary to stop the operation. The usual time of extracting the juice is early in the morning, before he has eaten, when the stomach is empty and clean.
