Student Spotlight: Caden Testa

Testa's dissertation, "Lamarck's Transformist Theory and the Politics of Evolution in Nineteenth-Century France," argues that "particularly in its French context, evolutionary ideas should be understood as arising from fears about national and social degeneration, and from the conviction that biological change and melioration might be a solution to various political ills." Testa's research has critical implications for historians of evolutionary theory in general, but it's relevance is also apparent in thinking about how individual and national concerns of human society are expressed in the development of scientific ideas. "Far from simply trying to work out a mechanism of speciation," Testa argues, "Lamarck was also motivated by questions about human society, and how a naturalist’s expertise might be put to work improving it."

Testa has won multiple awards and grants for this research. In March 2024, Testa won the Nancy L Mergler Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2024-2025. Just 1 month prior, Testa received an honourable mention at the MAGS Thesis competition. He was nominated to represent OU at MAGS by the Graduate College in light of his previous winning of the Graduate Dean’s Distinguished Thesis Award in October 2023. His master's thesis, "Species Transformation and Social Reform: The Role of the Will in Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Transformist Theory," was revised as an article and published in the Journal of the History of Biology under the same title in March 2023.

Testa also recently collaborated with Piers Hale as co-editor of the volume, Evolution in Victorian Britain, Volume I: Evolution Before Darwin, published this month by Routledge.

Lamarck's Transformist Theory and the Politics of Evolution in Nineteenth-Century France

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) is well known as a pre-Darwinian proponent of evolution. But much of what has been written on Lamarck, on his ‘Lamarckian’ belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, and on his conception of the role of the will in biological development mischaracterizes his views. Indeed, surprisingly little in-depth analysis has been published regarding his views on human physiology and development. Further, although since Robert M. Young’s signal 1969 essay on Malthus and the evolutionists, Darwin scholars have sought to place Darwin’s work in its social and political context, this has yet to be done adequately for Lamarck. In this dissertation I seek to address this gap. I examine Lamarck’s comments on human intelligence, physiology, and moral agency, and place them in the context of prevailing debates in France about the physiology of mind and morals and the future of the nation. Additionally, I show how Lamarckian ideas about biological melioration—particularly in relation to social and political reform—were adopted, adapted, and built upon throughout the nineteenth century. Even amongst those who were not prepared to embrace the idea of evolution as the mechanism of speciation, it was widely accepted that living organisms displayed a remarkable level of plasticity in their physiology and morphology, and that altering them physically could have far-reaching effects on functioning, social behavior, and overall wellbeing. This ‘voluntarist’ position was at the root of what would, over the course of the nineteenth century, give rise to various efforts to create a reformed and regenerated France by improving its people, including through hygienic reform, medical interventions, and the management of various pathologies that were believed to be hereditary, including ‘degeneration.’ In short, Lamarckian biology played a major role in what Michel Foucault termed “biopolitics.”