The construction of the total opposition between the Lamarckian and the Darwinian evolutionary theories was employed to classify authors scientists or not _ who wrote about evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Claire Richter, in Nietzsche et les theories biologiques contemporaines (1911), argues that Nietzsche's Lamarckism is very pronounced, and, for this, she distinguishes what is properly Darwinian or Lamarckian. In our article, we want to understand why this distinction was applied to a philosopher like Nietzsche. The key issue is the difference made by Richter between the natural selection and the inheritance of acquired characteristics and the relationship that she establishes between these notions and the eugenics. Her goal is to show Nietzsche to be an early and leading advocate of eugenics. Her effort to demonstrate that Nietzsche's thought is Lamarckian serves for the dissemination of eugenicists ideas. The inheritance of acquired characteristics can support and justify the social and educational measures to improve the race, because it is faster than the natural selection to modify living beings.
Darwinism; Eugenics; Evolution; Lamarckism; Natural selection; Nietzsche