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Evolution 101. An introduction to evolution: what is evolution and how does it work? The history of life: looking at the patterns – Change over time and shared ancestors; Mechanisms: the processes of evolution – Selection, mutation, migration, and more; Microevolution – Evolution within a population; Speciation – How new species arise
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, pioneering French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is refuted by modern genetics and evolutionary theory. He was also known as a botanical and zoological systematist and as a founder of invertebrate paleontology.
The doctrine, proposed by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1809, influenced evolutionary thought through most of the 19th century. Lamarckism was discredited by most geneticists after the 1930s, but certain of its ideas continued to be held in the Soviet Union into the mid-20th century.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Lamarck's contribution to evolutionary theory consisted of the first truly cohesive theory of biological 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 ...
Though he was building on the work of his mentor, Count George-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) is often credited with making the first large advance toward modern evolutionary theory because he was the first to propose a mechanism by which the gradual change of species might take place.
Lamarck (1744 - 1829) remains the best known figure of the pre-Darwinian era of evolutionism. Regrettably, he is usually viewed as a mere caricature of his ideas, namely as the person who got it "wrong" for insisting on the inheritance of acquired features as the central mechanism of transmutation.
Lamarck's Scientific Thought. Beginning in 1801, Lamarck began to publish details of his evolutionary theories. Where men like Buffon had hinted at the possibility of evolutionary change, Lamarck declared it forthrightly. In 1801 he wrote: . . .
