Lamarckian Inheritance

Darwin’s concept of evolution was very influential in further developing both scientific and social theories. It fueled several perspectives about the future and current state of society at the time. Charlotte Gilman, for example, used Darwinian evolution to challenge the future of women’s roles in society in Women and Economics. Veblen’s The Theory of The Leisure Class used evolutionary thought to criticize society’s atavism to a barbaric past. Freud, in his novel Civilization and its Discontents, applied evolution to his psychoanalysis of civilization to explain how a civilized environment creates an individual’s unhappiness. In this paper, I will argue that all three authors use the concept of Lamarckian inheritance to explain how the Darwinian
The first law states: “a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually…enlarges that organ…while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it…until it finally disappears.” The second law then expounds on the first and states: “all the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals…are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals….” All three authors, Gilman, Veblen, and Freud, use these two laws of Lamarckian inheritance to emphasize the Darwinian concept of man’s lowly descent by demonstrating that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” as the ancient characteristics of man’s ancestors are still ingrained within current evolved individuals. Once, the authors have demonstrated that the “stamp of [man’s] lowly origin” is still very prominent within evolved individuals; they develop their own separate arguments about the effects of inherited ancestral and barbaric
She begins by explaining that animals evolve due to the environmental conditions in which they live in. However, when the female animal is stripped of her freedom when the male animal realizes that it is “cheaper and easier to fight a little female, and have it done with, than to fight a big male every time,” the female’s environmental conditions change and no longer depend on nature but instead on man. Moreover, “the human animal…is affected…by what he does for his living,” such as how he gets his food supply in order to survive against “the struggle of existence.” Gilman makes it clear that males actively seek their food to survive, whereas “the female of genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.” As a result, “the female does not seek her own living in the specific activities of our race, but is fed by the male.” Not only is the female now dependent on the male to feed her, but “when man began to feed and defend woman, she ceased proportionately to feed and defend herself” and as a response to her new environment she no longer actively fought against “the struggle of existence.” Man became the “strongest