Tag Archives: Darwin

Over at Genetic Future, Daniel MacArthur quotes Joel Parker berating as ‘embarrassing’ biologists who claim that it was Darwin, and not Lamarck, who came up with the idea of an evolutionary tree:

I have noticed many evolutionary biologists making an embarrassing mistake of falsely attributing the first use of the tree analogy to Darwin. This has occurred in numerous documentaries and on websites which I will pass on naming here. Ironically, the earliest use of the tree analogy diagram to depict evolution was published in the year of Darwin’s birth (1809) by Lamarck in his book Philosophie Zoologique (see pg 463, http://tinyurl.com/knt7vr). Lamarck even uses botanical terms (branches and rameaux) to describe the origin of animals with respect to this figure. The figure that is usually cited from Darwin’s notebook is from 1837 (http://tinyurl.com/6hs5uv), a full 8 years after Lamarck’s death. Even with our high admiration for Darwin, we should at least give credit where credit is due, and not forget that much of evolution was becoming understood before Darwin. Explaining the mechanism of natural selection was Darwin’s great contribution.

This is actually largely correct; Lamarck did have a view of evolution that involved what we would now call evolutionary branching, though it was very different from what we now know to be the case. Lamarck deserves to be read and understood as one of the first people to put together a coherent view of evolution.

However, the statement is very wrong in a number of ways. It is far from a mistake to refer to Darwin as the originator of the evolutionary tree, and those of us who do so do so not out of ignorance.
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