Synopsis
Butler had intended Life and Habit to be an original contribution to evolutionary theory, and had already written most of it when a friend alerted him to the existence of Mivart’s work. After reading Mivart, Butler went back to the Origin of Species, where he noticed Darwin’s dismissal of ‘the well-known doctrine of inherited habit as advanced by Lamarck’. Remarkably, this was the first Butler had heard of a doctrine of inherited habit in anyone’s work; he had thought it was his own idea. The discovery that it was, in Butler’s own words, ‘a stale old theory of the exploded Lamarck’, placed his entire approach in a precarious position. On reflection, Butler saw that he faced a choice: accept that he had been labouring over a false premise already disproved by Darwin, or acknowledge and uphold the Lamarckian idea of use-inheritance, in direct opposition to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Just before Life and Habit was published, late in 1877, Butler wrote an apologetic note to Darwin’s son Francis, warning him that the book had ‘resolved itself into a downright attack upon your father’s view of evolution, and a defence of what I conceive to be Lamarck’s. I neither intended nor wished this, but I was simply driven into it.’
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À propos de l?auteur
Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was the iconoclastic English author of the Utopian satirical novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman The Way of All Flesh, published posthumously in 1903. Both have remained in print ever since. In other studies he examined Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, and Italian art, and made prose translations of the Iliad and Odyssey that are still consulted today. He was also an artist.
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