First, let us take Darwinism's most prominent historical rival, Lamarckism. When Lamarckism was first proposed in the early nineteenth century, it was not as a rival to Darwinism, because Darwinism had not yet been thought of. The Chevalier de Lamarck was ahead of his time. He was one of those eighteenth-century intellectuals who argued in favour of evolution. In this he was right, and he would deserve to be honoured for this alone, along with Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus and others. Lamarck also offered the best theory of the mechanism of evolution that anyone could come up with at the time, but there is no reason to suppose that, if the Darwinian theory of mechanism had been around at the time, he would have rejected it. It was not around, and it is Lamarck's misfortune that, at least in the English-speaking world, his name has become a label for an error - his theory of the mechanism of evolution - rather than for his correct belief in the fact that evolution has occurred. This is not a history book, and I shall not attempt a scholarly dissection of exactly what Lamarck himself said. There was a dose of mysticism in Lamarck's actual words - for instance, he had a strong belief in progress up what many people, even today, think of as the ladder of life; and he spoke of animals striving as if they, in some sense, consciously wanted to evolve. I shall extract from Lamarckism those non-mystical elements which, at least at first sight, seem to have a sporting chance of offering a real alternative to Darwinism. These elements, the only ones adopted by modern 'neo-Lamarckians', are basically two: the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the principle of use and disuse.
