Sir

Work by Lamarck scholars over the past 20 years calls into question some of the assertions made by Dan Graur and his colleagues in their Book Review (Nature 460, 688–689; 2009).

For example, far from being universally scorned, Jean Baptiste Lamarck became known as 'the French Linnaeus' during the 1820s. Speaking at Lamarck's funeral in December 1829, Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire remarked that the last years of the old naturalist's life had been brightened by the awareness of how much his work was appreciated in Europe, and especially in France (see http://www.lamarck.cnrs.fr).

During the 1820s, scientific, medical and cultural magazines discussed Lamarck's work at length. Even conservative commentators, who disliked Lamarck's veiled atheism, acknowledged his eminence as the foremost invertebrate zoologist of Europe. In Britain, several naturalists — including Darwin's first scientific mentor in Edinburgh, Robert Edmond Grant — bought Lamarck's works and commented favourably on them. Lamarck's Natural History of Invertebrates (1815–22) became compulsory reading for hundreds of practitioners of the newly fashionable science, geology.

Furthermore, Lamarck can scarcely be said to be a deist, as your authors seem to argue. He did not deny that people had an idea of God, but as the only possible knowledge open to humankind was based on material substances and properties, nothing at all could be said of God. To Lamarck, nature had no purpose, no finality — in short, it was going nowhere.