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2004, Encyclopedia of Animal Behavior
BACKGROUND. The famous nature/nurture-controversy turns around the causal contributions of genes versus environment to the behavior of both humans and animals. As such, it regularly pervades the scientific literature at least since the very beginning of evolutionary thinking and still today produces the hottest debates both in public and the academic world. For a better understanding of its ideological background, it is therefore recommended to make a short look back to the recent history of modern biology. The conceptual foundations of the theory of evolution were laid down by important people such as Lamarck, Darwin, and Weismann during the 19 th century. It is not by chance that these three persons stand out against the rest of the many other scientists who, at the time, were engaged in tackling the tricky problem of explaining the impressive variability of living forms. The French noble Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, the actual founder of the idea of an "e-volution" in the living world, became famous for his "law of the inheritance of acquired characters," that is, the conviction that "everything that the individual gains or loses through the influence of the predominant use or continuous nonuse of an organ, is passed on to the offspring by reproduction" (Lamarck 1809). Inspired by the successful breeding methods of cattle farmers and Thomas Malthus´ famous "Principle of Population" from 1798, which says that human populations grow faster than the food supply, the atheistic English theologian Charles Darwin complemented Lamarck´s law by the now commonly accepted mechanism of natural selection, where only the fittest individuals of a given population survive and reproduce. Whereas Darwin was certainly the first to properly appreciate the natural origin of species through selective forces exerted both by the physical (natural selection in a narrow sense) and the social environment (intraspecific selection, e.g., sexual selection) he was still ignorant regarding the true source of the required morphological and behavioral variability as the substrate of selection. He thus had no difficulty in agreeing to Lamarck´s quite speculative hypothesis that many domestic animals had lost their capability to raise up their ears because domestication had made it unnecessary to reliably detect the treacherous noises of approaching predators. The German biologist August Weismann conducted the first extensive experiments on this controversial subject, which clearly demonstrated that there exists no inheritance of acquired characters. Not surprisingly, his severing of hundreds of mouse tails produced no visible effect (shorter tails) in the subsequent generation of young mice.
The first edition corrected against the second; apparatus including lengthy scholarly introduction, substantial selections from other works by Darwin (letters, autobiography, Descent of Man, etc.); background works (Lyell, Malthus, Lamarck, Spencer, Huxley, et al.),and a guide to authors cited by Darwin.
2000 •
Darwin’s ideas on variation, heredity, and development differ significantly from twentieth-century views. First, Darwin held that environmental changes, acting either on the reproductive organs or the body, were necessary to generate variation. Second, heredity was a developmental, not a transmissional, process; variation was a change in the developmental process of change.An analysis of Darwin’s elaboration and modification of these two positions from his early notebooks (1836–1844) to the last edition of the Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication(1875) complements previous Darwin scholarship on these issues. Included in this analysis is a description of the way Darwin employed the distinction between transmission and development, as well as the conceptual relationship he saw between heredity and variation. This paper is part of a larger project comparing commitments regarding variation during the latter half of the nineteenth century.
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 19, 1983, 81-94.
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