I was once approached by a colleague, a celebrated Marxist historian and a most cultivated and well-read man. He understood, he said, that the facts all seemed to be against the Lamarckian theory, but was there really no hope that it might be true? I told him that in my opinion there was none, and he accepted this with sincere regret, saying that for ideological reasons he had wanted Lamarckism to be true. It seemed to offer such positive hopes for the betterment of humanity.
