geography in the United States and Great

Since Neo-Lamarckian evolution seemed satisfactorily to avoid many of the difficulties encountered by Darwinian evolutionary theory (even after the rediscovery of Mendel's findings), to accord better with developmentalist social thought pre- and post-1859, to circumvent Darwin's challenge to religious orthodoxy, and to confirm late nineteenth century optimism, Neo- Lamarckism won broad support from contemporary natural and social scientists around the turn of the century. Early modern geography in the United States clearly reflected the influence of a powerful domestic Neo-Lamarckian school of biology, of reform Darwinism in sociology, and of the application of the Teutonic theory to American history. In practice, it was the environmentalist component in Neo-Lamarckism that provided the most coherent theoretical framework for American geography's deterministic interpretation of organic response to environment. Support for Neo-Lamarckism among British geographers sprang in particular from Spencer's evolutionism, and was reinforced by a trans-Atlantic transfer of similar ideas. In Great Britain, however, the environ- mentalist dimension was rather more clearly supplemented by that idealist emphasis on consciousness intrinsic to classical Lamarckism, thereby allowing many British Neo-Lamarckian geographers to merge their thinking with possibilism in the inter-war years.