The Laws of Evolution of Lamarck

The true order of things involves recognizing the following:

1. All slightly remarkable changes later maintained in circumstances where each race of animals is located works to create in that race a real change in its needs.

2. All changes in animals’ needs require of them alternative actions to satisfy the new needs and, consequently, alternative habits.

3. The efforts of the animal’s interior feeling arises from the demands for new actions to satisfy every new need

This leads to the more frequent use of some of its parts which then makes that part grow or develop.

The infinitely diversified and slowly changing conditions experienced by animals creates new needs and necessarily changes in their habits through generations.

There are 2 laws of nature which observation has always confirmed.

First Law

In every developing animal, the more frequent and sustained use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops, enlarges, and empowers it proportional to the duration of this use.

The constant lack of use of such an organ imperceptibly weakens it, makes it deteriorate, progressively diminishes it faculties, and ends by making it disappear.

Second Law

Conditions influence a race for a long time, making them acquire or lose traits.

The increase of decrease of organs from the use or disuse of them is transferred to the offspring provided that the acquired changes are common to the two sexes or to those who have produced these new individuals.*

Naturalists noticed that the forms of animals’ parts are always linked to their use of these parts.

• So they mistook that the forms and the condition of the parts had led to the usage.

If this were true, then nature would have created for the animal parts as many forms as required by the diversity of circumstances they encounter.

If so, we would not have:

• race horses in the form of those in England.
• our large draught horses, so heavy and different from these race horses, for nature on her own did not produce anything like them.
• basset hounds with crooked limbs, such swift-running greyhounds, water spaniels, and so on
• tailless hens, fantail pigeons, and so on

We would be able to cultivate wild plants as much as we liked in the rich fertile soil of our gardens, without fear of seeing them change through long cultivation.

In reality, it is the needs and the use of the parts which have developed those parts.

That is certainly not the natural order which exists.

The proverb “habits form a second nature” supports the laws above.

• If habits and the nature of every animal could never change, the proverb would be false.

If one considers seriously everything which I have just revealed, one will sense that I grounded my views rationally when in my work entitled