Neo-Lamarckism and the Development of Geography in the United States and Great Britain

Abstract

Since Neo-Lamarckian evolution seemed satisfactorily to avoid many of the difficulties encountered by Darwinian evolutionary theory (even after the rediscovery of Mendel's findings), to accord better with developmentalist social thought preand post-1859, to circumvent Darwin's challenge to religious orthodoxy, and to confirm late nineteenth century optimism, NeoLamarckism won broad support from contemporary natural and social scientists around the turn of the century. Early modern geography in the United States clearly reflected the influence of a powerful domestic Neo-Lamarckian school of biology, of reform Darwinism in sociology, and of the application of the Teutonic theory to American history. In practice, it was the environmentalist component in Neo-Lamarckism that provided the most coherent theoretical framework for American geography's deterministic interpretation of organic response to environment. Support for Neo-Lamarckism among British geographers sprang in particular from Spencer's evolutionism, and was reinforced by a trans-Atlantic transfer of similar ideas. In Great Britain, however, the environmentalist dimension was rather more clearly supplemented by that idealist emphasis on consciousness intrinsic to classical Lamarckism, thereby allowing many British Neo-Lamarckian geographers to merge their thinking with possibilism in the inter-war