In response to:
Turtles All the Way Up from the February 13, 2025 issue
To the Editors:
A rather significant factual gaffe by reviewer Jessica Riskin [“Turtles All the Way Up,” NYR, February 13]. She writes:
Despite such seemingly deistic moments in his writings, Darwin took a great interest in the capacity of animals to be their own creators, transforming themselves, one another, and their environment, and so influencing the course of evolution. An example is his idea of “use and disuse”: animals strengthen and enhance their body parts by using them, or weaken them by declining to use them, then pass these changes on to their offspring.
This was expressly not Darwin’s view, but rather that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. For Darwin, adaptations were the result of mutations leading to trait variation among individuals in a population, which were then filtered through conditions in a local environment, favoring certain variants and disfavoring others. The New York Review of Books, often host to the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, who adamantly rejected genetic determinism, should know better than this!
Michael Friedman
Visiting Assistant Professor of Biology
Pratt Institute
Brooklyn, New York
Jessica Riskin replies:
Darwin unwaveringly believed that what he called “the inherited effects of use and disuse” constituted an important factor in evolution. He included this factor in every edition of The Origin of Species, through the final version in 1876, and in his other major works, The Descent of Man and The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. (See especially chapter 24 of volume 2, “Laws of Variation—Use and Disuse, Etc.”) My late undergraduate adviser Stephen Jay Gould recognized Darwin’s belief in “use and disuse.” In Gould’s famous essay with Richard Lewontin on the “Spandrels of San Marco,” they quoted a letter by Darwin in which he wrote, “I believe that no one has brought forward so many observations on the effects of the use and disuse of parts, as I have done,” and they commented, “We should cherish his consistent attitude of pluralism in attempting to explain Nature’s complexity.”
