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| Name | Jean-Baptiste Lamarck |
|---|---|
| Caption | Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck |
| Birth date | August 01, 1744 |
| Birth place | Bazentin, Picardie |
| Death date | December 18, 1829 |
| Death place | Paris |
| Nationality | French |
| Work institutions | French Academy of Sciences; Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle; Jardin des Plantes |
| Known for | Evolution; inheritance of acquired characteristics, Influenced Geoffroy |
| Author abbrev bot | Lam. |
| Author abbrev zoo | Lamarck |
Lamarck fought in the Pomeranian War with Prussia, and was awarded a commission for bravery on the battlefield. At his post in Monaco, Lamarck became interested in natural history and resolved to study medicine. He retired from the army after being injured in 1766, and returned to his medical studies. Lamarck continued his work as a premier authority on invertebrate zoology. He is remembered, at least in malacology, as a taxonomist of considerable stature.
In the modern era, Lamarck is primarily remembered for a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, called soft inheritance or Lamarckism. However, his idea of soft inheritance was, perhaps, a reflection of the folk wisdom of the time, accepted by many natural historians. Lamarck's contribution to evolutionary theory consisted of the first truly cohesive theory of evolution, in which an alchemical complexifying force drove organisms up a ladder of complexity, and a second environmental force adapted them to local environments through use and disuse of characteristics, differentiating them from other organisms.
In his two years of travel, Lamarck collected rare plants that were not available in the Royal Garden, and also other objects of natural history, such as minerals and ores, that were not found in French museums. On January 7, 1786, his second son, Antoine, was born, and Lamarck chose Antoine Laurent de Jussieu, Bernard de Jussieu's nephew, as the boy's godfather. On April 21 of the following year, Charles Rene, Lamarck's third son, was born. René Louiche Desfontaines, a professor of botany at the Royal Garden, was the boy's godfather, and Lamarck's elder sister, Marie Charlotte Pelagie De Monet was the godmother. Lamarck had worked as the keeper of the herbarium for five years before he was appointed curator and professor of invertebrate zoology at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in 1793. The following year on October 9, he married Charlotte Reverdy, who was thirty years his junior. In Hydrogéologie, Lamarck advocated a steady-state geology based on a strict uniformitarianism. He argued that global currents tended to flow from east to west, and continents eroded on their eastern borders, with the material carried across to be deposited on the western borders. Thus, the Earth's continents marched steadily westward around the globe.
That year, he also published Recherches sur l'Organisation des Corps Vivants, in which he drew out his theory on evolution. He believed that all life was organized in a vertical chain, with gradation between the lowest forms and the highest forms of life, thus demonstrating a path to progressive developments in nature.
In his own work, Lamarck had favored the then-more traditional theory based on the Classical four elements. During Lamarck's lifetime he became controversial, attacking the more enlightened chemistry proposed by Lavoisier. He also came into conflict with the widely respected palaeontologist Georges Cuvier, who was not a supporter of evolution. According to Bowler, "[Cuvier] ridiculed Lamarck's theory of transformation and defended the fixity of species." According to Rudwick:
Lamarck gradually turned blind and died in Paris on December 18, 1829. When he died, his family was so poor they had to apply to the Academie for financial assistance. Lamarck's books and the contents of his home were sold at auction, and his body was buried in a temporary lime-pit.
After his death, Cuvier used the forum of a eulogy to denigrate Lamarck:
Lamarck stressed two main themes in his biological work. The first was that the environment gives rise to changes in animals. He cited examples of blindness in moles, the presence of teeth in mammals and the absence of teeth in birds as evidence of this principle. The second principle was that life was structured in an orderly manner and that many different parts of all bodies make it possible for the organic movements of animals.
This first law says little except "an exaggerated generalization of the belief that exercise develops an organ".
:Second Law: All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on individuals, through the influence of the environment in which their race has long been placed, and hence through the influence of the predominant use or permanent disuse of any organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to the new individuals which arise, provided that the acquired modifications are common to both sexes, or at least to the individuals which produce the young.
Lamarck is usually remembered for his belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the use and disuse model by which organisms developed their characteristics. Lamarck incorporated this belief into his theory of evolution, along with other more common beliefs of the time, such as spontaneous generation. The inheritance of acquired characteristics (also called the theory of adaptation or soft inheritance) was rejected by August Weismann in the 1880s when he developed a theory of inheritance in which germ plasm (the sex cells, later redefined as DNA), remained separate and distinct from the soma (the rest of the body); thus nothing which happens to the soma may be passed on with the germ-plasm. This model underlies the modern understanding of inheritance.
Charles Darwin allowed a role for use and disuse as an evolutionary mechanism subsidiary to natural selection, most often in respect of disuse. He praised Lamarck for "the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic... world, being the result of law, not miraculous interposition". Lamarckism is also occasionally used to describe quasi-evolutionary concepts in societal contexts, though not by Lamarck himself. For example, the memetic theory of cultural evolution is sometimes described as a form of Lamarckian inheritance of non-genetic traits.
In contrast to the eventual general rejection of his proposed mechanism for evolution, Lamarck's seven-volume work on the natural history of invertebrates is recognised as a lasting contribution to zoology.
The International Plant Names Index gives 116 records of plant species named after Lamarck.
Among the marine species, no less than 103 species or genera carry the epithet “lamarcki”, “lamarckii” or “lamarckiana”, but many have since become synonyms. Marine species with valid names include :
On invertebrate classification:
Category:Articles with inconsistent citation formats Category:1744 births Category:1829 deaths Category:People from Somme Category:Botanists with author abbreviations Category:Proto-evolutionary biologists Category:French naturalists Category:Members of the French Academy of Sciences Category:French science writers Category:18th-century French writers Category:French zoologists Category:French scientists Category:Teuthologists
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