Jean Baptiste Lamarck

I'm no PhD, but in my short time as a post-bacc I've found that I'm especially interested in the progression of scientific history- how theories are proposed, heralded, discredited and discarded.  Much like pop culture interestingly, the scientific community will fixate on one figure. Despite the breadth of their contribution, or lack of, the mythology of their theories and work gets distorted over time as folks add and subtract to them. Certain people will not get the credit they deserve for their work, or alternately too much credit for work they maybe didn't do, but became central because of the discoveries of others.

I think it's also interesting how little time is spent in science classes looking at where these theories are coming from- historically, culturally, contextually.  I think it's most likely in the interest of time since you have only so many lectures to squeeze in all the practical knowledge that is required for the course- but I think it's helpful to think about where this information comes from, so we can be critical about it, and maybe make more informed decisions moving forward with our own work as fledgling contributors to the scientific community.

That being said, today's Unlikely Science Hero is Jean-Batiste Lamarck.  People seem to talk a lot of smack about Lamarck, with the exception of my brilliant genetics professor.  When I was recently studying for the MCAT last Summer, Lamarck was even listed in the official AMCAS study guide as the right answer to "wrong evolution."  After a quick check on Wikipedia, which I feel like is the most likely first source of information for people in general, and so in many ways reflects the greater knowledge of people about a subject, Lamarck's theory is said to "reflect folk wisdom of the time," which is both true and untrue.  While most people recognize that Lamarck was really the first one to propose a unified theory of evolution that linked changes in the demands of environment to changes in the phenotype of organisms, people also kind of write him off as a silly goose, that "use and disuse" is not a useful framework of evolution because you can't inherit a change in your parents unless it's genetically encoded.

But now we've discovered this super cool new phenomenon called epigenetics, where gene expression can be changed from generation to generation by mechanisms that AREN'T related to the underlying DNA sequence.  Epigenetics is so new (the term was coined in 1942, but it's only recently gaining momentum with research) that as I type this, Blogger doesn't even recognize the word!  It also means that maybe Lamarck wasn't as folksy as people thought he was, and his ideas were actually pretty revolutionary. 

In popular culture, there was recently a very nicely done Radiolab which among other interesting stories about environment and inheritance (including an excellently entertaining tale of a true charlatan that ends in tragedy) told the story of a recently released study between scientists at McGill and Columbia about epigenetics in action in the minds of mother rats.

Even just today, the New York Times printed this article about mutations in gene control regions  as opposed to genes themselves as an underlying cause for some cancers.  Gene control regions that have been directly mutated by UV light- the environment.

Was Lamarck right that the baby giraffe's neck would be longer because it's mother had reached higher and higher for leaves, stretching herself?  No.  But did he have some brilliant insight into the possible ways our environment has the potential to act directly on us?  Perhaps!

Some other cool things Lamarck has done include: 

Earning marks for bravery in the Pomeranian War (Pomeranian War!  That is a funny mental picture to me..)

Coined the term invertebrates and went on to have many species named in his honor, like the honey bee! (Apis mellifera lamarckii)

Wrote a seven volume work on invertebrates that is still useful today

So before you go throwing a party for Darwin, remember that Lamarck came first, and that much of what people consider Darwinian today is an amalgamation of Lamarckism, Darwinism, and a lot of new -isms that have accumulated onto Darwin as the decades have passed.