When we become ill, most of us lay the blame at the feet of our ancestors: my heart problem is like dad’s, who had a dicky ticker; I’m likely to get breast cancer because it’s what my grandmother died of. We look upon ourselves in a sense as victims—victims of our genetic history. Nowadays, virtually all of medicine is ...

More than 50 years before Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species, French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck wrote Les Recherches sur L’Organisation des Corps Vivants, the first book to set out a coherent and well-developed theory of evolution. Where Lamarck differed from Darwin was in his belief that the environment, rather than genetic ...