Behind the Book: Historian Jessica Riskin on "The Power of Life"

On March 24, Stanford Public Humanities hosted Jessica Riskin, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, at the Humanities Center to celebrate her new book "The Power of Life" (Riverhead Books/Penguin, March 24, 2026). The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented figures in the history of science. Working in Paris in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, he proposed the first evolutionary theory of life and with it a new science: biology. But his bold reimagining of nature was as radical as it was heretical, earning him formidable enemies and consigning him to the margins of science for the past two centuries. In "The Power of Life" Riskin tells the story of Lamarck’s life and work as an intense struggle between rival forces to answer questions that remain foundational to our modern worldview: What is a living being, and what is science? 

Jessica Riskin was joined in conversation with Tom Hayden, Director of Stanford's Graduate Environmental Communication Program.