Normand Baillargeon retweetledi
Background: The political left has hoped and dreamed that Lamarckism is true for more than a century, despite its manifest absurdity (how can a macroscopic effect on the body be reverse-coded into genetic instructions and passed into eggs and sperm? Why aren’t Jewish boys born pre-circumcised)? Lamarck’s principle of “Felt need” is just as mystical – how does needing to see conjure an eye into being?
George Bernard Shaw, the Fabian socialist, wrote: “"Darwinism seems simple because you do not at first realize all that it involves. But when its whole significance dawns on you, your heart sinks into a heap of sand within you. There is a hideous fatalism about it, a ghastly and damnable reduction of beauty and intelligence, of strength and purpose, of honor and aspiration." (One may contrast this with Darwin’s own ending to the Origin, in which he eloquently wrote, “There is grandeur in this view of life….”) And of course the famines in Soviet Russia arose from Lysenko making Lamarckism official state doctrine.
Yet the academic left won’t give up, grasping at epigenetic straws (very different) as if they vindicated Jean-Baptiste. That task seems to have fallen to Riskin, who, with Marcus Feldman, has inherited the role of anti-genetics and anti-evolution policeman for the New York Review of Books now that Stephen Jay Gould and Jerry’s mentor Dick Lewontin are no longer with us.
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