ABSTRACT
This chapter constitutes an attempt to resurrect, in a modified form and hopefully with some lasting impact, one of the most persistent themes in the history of biology: Lamarck's phoenix-like Second Law of biological evolution. To be more precise, I will attempt to vindicate some of the underlying intuitions of the Lamarckian position. In undertaking this, one must concede from the start that the actual mechanism proposed by Lamarck to account for -- as he saw it -- the inheritance of acquired traits, has been shown to be empirically untenable. Here is how Lamarck (1809) expressed his Second Law:
"...AII the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals... are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young..." (1809, p. 113; see also Mayr, 1972)
With many other astute biologists (Darwin included), Lamarck could not help observing the correlation between the use and disuse of organs, on the one hand, and their evolutionary fate, on the other. The Western propensity for reductionism, however, has backed us into the usual choice between two uncomfortable extremes: A rigid mutationist stance, or equally rigid Lamarckist rendition of the interplay between individual behavior and genetic substance in determining the course of evolution. Mayr (1982) sums up this reductionism as follows: * I am greatly indebted to Prof. Ernst Mayr for many valuable suggestions and comments on an earlier draft of the manuscript.
