  Apart from those urging Darwin to give up chance in favor of design, he had pressure to abandon chance from another direction, the evolutionary philosophy of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarck’s is a materialistic argument against the variation in nature being a matter of chance. On the Lamarckian view, variations arise in an organism as a direct response to environmental stress or demand, giving rise to a stimulus, which in turn elicits a physiological response, which finally can be passed on via reproduction to offspring.  Variations are not chance or random, since they are an appropriate response to an environmental stress.  Here ‘chance’ signals a lack of relation or connection to adaptive needs, an idea akin to, but ontologically quite distinct from, the contrast between ‘chance’ and ‘design’. 