Jessica Riskin is the author of the new book The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology & the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Her other books include The Restless Clock. She is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University.
Q: What inspired you to write a book about naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck(1744-1829) and his work?
A: I was trying to finish a different book, The Restless Clock, and it suddenly dawned on me that that book should have been about Lamarck.
It was about a struggle between two competing traditions in the history of biology, one that saw living beings as passive machines and the other as active, self-making, self-transforming things.
I was writing a brief section on Lamarck, and I thought “wait a minute, he really should have been the hero of this book - he’s the original champion of living beings, down to the very humblest of them, and the idea of their creative agency.”
For a minute, my heart sank. I’d already rewritten the book several times and I thought I can’t take this book apart and rewrite it again. And then I realized I’d just have to give Lamarck his own book!
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
A: I’m so glad you asked! I really wanted to call the book The Professor of Insects and Worms, because that was Lamarck’s wonderful job title at the natural history museum in the Paris botanical garden, the Jardin des plantes.
I loved that title. I thought it sounded like a novel. But everyone – my agent, my editor – said nope, absolutely not. I kept on asking and they kept firmly repeating no, really no, still no. I’m sure they were right.
Anyhow, “The Power of Life” was the suggestion of a young woman named Elena Steiert who was working with my agent. She took the phrase from none other than Lamarck himself. He gave the name “power of life” to the tendency of living beings to create and recreate themselves.
I thought, if it can’t be Professor of Insects and Worms, let’s use his own phrase.
Q: How did you research the book, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: The research started out a bit rough: it was the Covid shutdown in France and all the libraries and archives were closed. But I realized that my story really began in the Jardin des plantes, where Lamarck lived and worked. So, I started by exploring the garden to set the stage.
Eventually the libraries and archives reopened, and I was able to go into the natural history museum’s collections and look at Lamarck’s papers.
One of the best moments was when I met his great-great-great-great granddaughter, Anne Lécrivain, who kindly invited me to her house outside Paris. She showed me the beautiful portrait of Lamarck painted by Charles Thévenin in 1802, which has been in the family ever since.
At one point she exclaimed, “Oh, I have something else that’ll interest you,” and she went over to a bin of umbrellas by her front door and drew out a sword! It was Lamarck’s ceremonial sword from the Legion of Honor.
The thing I’d say I was happiest to discover, although I’m not sure it surprised me exactly, was that Lamarck, almost alone among his contemporaries and colleagues, never ranked human beings by race, sex, class or any other category. His understanding of living beings, including humans, was the opposite of reductive.
Q: The scholar and author Jill Lepore said of the book, “The long-underrated and much-maligned professor of insects and worms is vindicated as the founder of a set of revolutionary ideas whose time, nearly two centuries after his death, has come at last.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I love it! For one thing, she gets my beloved title “professor of insects and worms” in there. Also, she captures both the historical interest of the story and its current relevance.
Lamarck’s revolutionary ideas were foundational to modern biology, yet he was mocked and banished from mainstream science for two centuries, and now his central principle, that organisms have evolutionary agency, is returning to once again revolutionize biology.
Jill Lepore is such a magnificent writer, she built all of that into a charming one-sentence story.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working my way into a book about the great divorce between the sciences and the humanities that happened around the turn of the 20th century.
Before then, the sciences were all intermixed with philosophy, history, literature and the arts. Then came a moment of rupture in which scientists started insisting on the absolute separateness of science from all other forms of understanding, a new and transcendent kind of authority.
I think in the current crisis – the environmental crisis, the crisis in public regard for science – we really need to re-attach the sciences to other modes of thinking and communicating.
So, I’d like to try to write a book about how science came to be in its current position of splendid isolation and how we might think our way back out of that situation.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: The Power of Life has both a story and an argument.
The story is about Lamarck, his life and career, and the fortunes of his science from his death until the present day.
The argument is about the consequences of a science that has regarded living beings as passive objects and the importance of reestablishing one that acknowledges their irreducible agency.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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