Editing Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis (section)

==Evolution==

Cabanis was an early proponent of [[History of evolutionary thought|evolution]].<ref name="Staum">Staum, Martin S. (1980). ''Cabanis: Enlightenment and Medical Philosophy in the French Revolution''. Princeton University Press. pp. 188-189. {{ISBN|0-691-05301-4}}</ref><ref name="Richards">Richards. Robert J. (1987). ''Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior''. University of Chicago Press. pp. 37-47. {{ISBN|0-226-71200-1}}</ref> In the ''[[Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]'' it is stated that he "believed in spontaneous generation. Species have evolved through chance mutations ("fortuitous changes") and planned mutation ("man's experimental attempts") which change the structures of heredity."<ref>Borchert, Donald M. (2006). ''[[Encyclopedia of Philosophy]]: Volume 2''. Macmillan. p. 3. {{ISBN|0-02-865782-9}}</ref>

He influenced the work of [[Jean-Baptiste Lamarck]], who referred to Cabanis in his ''[[Philosophie Zoologique]]''.<ref name="Richards"/><ref>Ruse, Michael. (1996). ''Monad to Man: The Concept of Progress in Evolutionary Biology''. Harvard University Press. pp. 53-54. {{ISBN|978-0-674-03248-4}}</ref> Cabanis was an advocate of the [[inheritance of acquired characteristics]]; he also developed his own theory of [[instinct]].<ref name="Richards"/>

Cabanis made a statement that recognized a basic understanding of [[natural selection]]. Historian Martin S. Staum has written that:

<blockquote>In a simple statement of adaptation and selection theory, Cabanis argued that species that have escaped extinction "have had successively to bend and conform to sequences of circumstances, from which apparently were born, in each particular circumstance, other entirely new species, better adjusted to the new order of things."<ref name="Staum"/></blockquote>