Lamarck's perspective on change within the organic world, in particular his conception of "la marche de la nature," , crystallized during the last decade of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th. I argue that it should be viewed as resulting in part from interactions with, and transfers from, the social thought—modes of thinking, ways of conceptualizing, models, metaphors and analogies—of the decades before the French revolution and of the revolutionary decade itself. Moreover, Lamarck's involvement with the (...) new institutional frameworks initiated during the revolutionary period had brought him into direct contacts with the then prevalent modes of discourse on things social. (shrink)

In 1847, the British polymath William Whewell pointed out that the sciences for which he, in 1837, had coined the term “palætiological” have much in common and that they may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. This recommendation is here put into practice in a specific way, to wit, not by comparing the palaetiological sciences that Whewell distinguished himself but by comparing the general historical development of the scientific study of the four broad palætiological domains that he (...) enumerated in 1847: the solar system, the Earth, its vegetable and animal creation, and man. For wide and various as their subjects are, it will be found that [the palætiological sciences] have all certain principles, maxims, and rules of procedure in common; and thus may reflect light upon each other by being treated together. William Whewell ( 1847, 1, p. 640). (shrink)

Bernard Norton's friends in the history of science have had many reasons for commemorating, with admiration and affection, not only his research and teaching but no less his conversation and his company. One of his most estimable traits was his refusal to beat about the bush in raising the questions he thought worthwhile pursuing. I still remember discoursing at Pittsburgh on Darwin's route to his theory of natural selection, and being asked at the end by Bernard what were Darwin's views (...) on heredity. I answered with the conventional waffle to the effect that the theory concerned the populational fate rather than the individual production and transmission of heritable variation, so that whatever views Darwin had on heredity had only a subsidiary place in his theorizing. Bernard was not fooled. ‘I would have thought’, he said, ‘that in order to understand anyone's theorising about evolution it would be necessary to look at his views on heredity’. (shrink)