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Oct 7, 2015 · French naturalist Jean Baptiste Lamarck, for instance, suggested that the giraffe neck lengthened as the animals stretched to reach leaves high in trees, with a “nervous fluid” flowing into...
- Change Through Use and Disuse
- Organisms Driven to Greater Complexity
- Evolution by Natural Processes
- Different from Darwin
Lamarck was struck by the similarities of many of the animals he studied, and was impressed too by the burgeoning fossil record. It led him to argue that life was not fixed. When environments changed, organisms had to change their behavior to survive. If they began to use an organ more than they had in the past, it would increase in its lifetime. I...
This sort of evolution, for which Lamarck is most famous today, was only one of two mechanisms he proposed. As organisms adapted to their surroundings, nature also drove them inexorably upward from simple forms to increasingly complex ones. Like Buffon, Lamarck believed that life had begun through spontaneous generation. But he claimed that new pri...
Lamarck was proposing that life took on its current form through natural processes, not through miraculous interventions. For British naturalists in particular, steeped as they were in natural theology, this was appalling. They believed that nature was a reflection of God’s benevolent design. To them, it seemed Lamarck was claiming that it was the ...
Darwin relied on much the same evidence for evolution that Lamarck did (such as vestigial structures and artificial selectionthrough breeding), but made completely different arguments from Lamarck. Darwin did not accept an arrow of complexity driving through the history of life. He argued that complexity evolved simply as a result of life adapting ...
Lamarckism; giraffe Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed that acquired characteristics were inheritable. For example, as a giraffe stretches its neck to browse higher in trees, the continuation of the habit over an extended period results in a gradual lengthening of the limbs and neck.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
The classic example used to explain the concept of use and disuse is the elongated neck of the giraffe. According to Lamarck's theory, a given giraffe could, over a lifetime of straining to reach high branches, develop an elongated neck.
May 17, 2016 · The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck held that a giraffe was merely an antelope whose progenitors had strained their necks toward higher and higher branches for food.
Lamarck's theory suggested that the giraffe's original short-necked ancestor repeatedly stretched its neck to reach the higher branches to eat. Lamarck believed that the stretching...
Sep 14, 2017 · The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck suggested that giraffes’ necks became stretched as they constantly reached for foliage (an idea very much ahead of its time but for which he is...
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