Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck (August 1, 1744 - December 28, 1829) was a major 19th century French naturalist, who was one of the first to use the term biology in its modern sense.¹ Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... August 1st is the 213th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (214th in leap years), with 152 days remaining. ... Events The third French and Indian War, known as King Georges War, breaks out at Port Royal, Nova Scotia Ongoing events War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) Births May 19 - Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, queen of George III of Great Britain (d. ... December 28 is the 362nd day of the year (363rd in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 3 days remaining. ... 1829 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... Main article: Life There are many universal units and common processes that are fundamental to the known forms of life. ...

Lamarck is remembered today mainly in connection with a discredited theory of heredity, the "inheritance of acquired traits", but Charles Darwin and others acknowledged him as an early proponent of ideas about evolution. In 1861, for example, Darwin wrote: For the scientific journal Heredity see Heredity (journal) Heredity (the adjective is hereditary) is the transfer of characters from parent to offspring, either through their genes or through the social institution called inheritance (for example, a title of nobility is passed from individual to individual according to relevant customs and... The theory of the inheritance of acquired traits was formulated by the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. ... Charles Darwin, about the same time as the publication of The Origin of Species. ... 1861 is a common year starting on Tuesday. ...

"Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions on the subject excited much attention. This justly celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801. . . he first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition."

Lamarck's own theory of evolution was in fact based on the idea that individuals adapt during their own lifetimes and transmit traits they acquire to their offspring. Offspring then adapt from where the parents left off, enabling evolution to advance. As a mechanism for adaptation, Lamarck proposed that individuals increased specific capabilities by exercising them, while losing others through disuse. While this conception of evolution did not originate wholly with Lamarck, he has come to personify pre-Darwinian ideas about biological evolution, now called Lamarckism. Charles Darwin, the father of modern evolutionary theory In the life sciences, evolution is a change in the traits of living organisms over generations, including the emergence of new species. ... This article is about Darwinism as a philosophical concept; see evolution for the page on biological evolution; modern evolutionary synthesis for neo-Darwinism; and also evolution (disambiguation). ... Lamarckism is a now discredited theory of biological evolution developed by French biologist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck in the 19th century. ...

Born into poor nobility (hence 'chevalier'), Lamarck served in the army before becoming interested in natural history and writing a multi-volume flora of France. This caught the attention of Le Comte de Buffon who arranged for him to be appointed to the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Natural history is an umbrella term for what are now usually viewed as a number of distinct scientific disciplines. ... Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (September 7, 1707 – April 16, 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, biologist, cosmologist and author. ... The Muséum national dHistoire naturelle (MNHN) is the French national museum of natural history. ... The Eiffel Tower has become a symbol of Paris throughout the world. ...

After years working on plants, Lamarck was appointed curator of invertebrates -- another term he coined. He began a series of public lectures. Before 1800, he was an essentialist who believed species were unchanging. After working on the molluscs of the Paris Basin, he grew convinced that transmutation or change in the nature of a species occurred over time. He set out to develop an explanation, which he outlined in his 1809 work, Philosophie Zoologique. Invertebrate is a term coined by Chevalier de Lamarck to describe any animal without a backbone or vertebra, like insects, squids and worms. ... 1800 was a common year starting on Wednesday (see link for calendar). ... In biology, a species is a kind of organism. ... Classes Caudofoveata Aplacophora Polyplacophora - Chitons Monoplacophora Bivalvia - Bivalves Scaphopoda - Tusk shells Gastropoda - Snails and Slugs Cephalopoda - Squids, Octopuses, etc. ... 1809 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ...

Lamarck developed two laws:

1. In every animal which has not passed the limit of its development, a more frequent and continuous use of any organ gradually strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ, and gives it a power proportional to the length of time it has been so used; while the permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally disappears.
2. 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 saw spontaneous generation as being ongoing, with the simple organisms thus created being transmuted over time (by his mechanism) becoming more complex and closer to some notional idea of perfection. He thus believed in a teleological (goal-oriented) process where organisms became more perfect as they evolved. During his lifetime he became controversial; his criticism of the palaeontologist Georges Cuvier’s anti-evolutionary stance won him no friends. Abiogenesis, in its most general sense, is the hypothetical generation of life from non-living matter. ... Teleology is the position that there is design, purpose, directive principle, or finality in the works and processes of nature, and the philosophical study of that purpose. ... A paleontologist carefully chips rock from a column of dinosaur vertebrae. ... Georges Cuvier Baron Georges Leopold Chretien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (August 23, 1769 - May 13, 1832) was a French naturalist, He was born at Montbéliard (then Mömpelgard in Württemberg) under the name of Johann Leopold Nicolaus Friedrich Kuefer, and was the son of a retired officer...

His defenders believe he is unfairly vilified today. They note that he believed in organic evolution at a time when there was no theoretical framework to explain evolution. He also argued that function precedes form, an issue of some contention among evolutionary theorists at the time. On the other hand, the inheritance of acquired characteristics is now widely refuted. August Weismann disproved the theory by cutting the tails off mice, demonstrating that the injury was not passed on to the offspring. Jews and other religious groups have been circumcising men for hundreds of generations with no noticeable withering of the foreskin among their descendants. However, Lamarck did not count injury or mutilation as a true acquired characteristic, only those which were initiated by the animal's own needs were deemed to be passed on. August Weismann (January 17, 1834 _ November 5, 1914) was a German biologist. ... Circumcision is the removal of some or all of the prepuce (foreskin). ...

Nowadays, the idea of passing on to offspring characteristics that were acquired during an organism's lifetime is called Lamarckian. This view was, until very recently, thought to be completely inconsistent with modern genetics, but recent discoveries, as discussed in the article on epigenetic inheritance, show that this is not quite the case. So there may be room for some sort of Lamarckian evolution after all. Another contemporary view is that memetic ideas of cultural evolution could be considered a form of Lamarckian inheritance of non-genetic traits. Lamarckism is a now discredited theory of biological evolution developed by French biologist Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck in the 19th century. ... Epigenetic inheritance is the transmission of information from a cell or multicellular organism to its descendants without that information being encoded in the nucleotide sequence of the gene. ... Meme, (rhymes with cream and comes from Greek root with the meaning of memory and its derivative mimeme), is the term given to a unit of information that replicates from brains and inanimate stores of information, such as books and computers, to other brains or stores of information. ... Cultural evolution is the structural development (change) of a society over time. ...

Darwin not only praised Lamarck in the third edition of The Origin of Species for supporting the concept of evolution and bringing it to the attention of others, but also accepted the idea of use and disuse, and developed his theory of pangenesis partially to explain its apparent occurrence. Darwin and many contemporaries also believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics, an idea that was much more plausible before the discovery of the cellular mechanisms for genetic transmission. (Darwin, incidentally, acknowledged his theory would remain somewhat incomplete if the mechanism for inheritance could not be discovered.) The 1859 edition of On the Origin of Species First published in 1859, The Origin of Species (full title On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life) by British naturalist Charles Darwin is one of the pivotal... Pangenesis was Charles Darwins hypothetical mechanism for heredity. ... Genetics (from the Greek genno γεννώ= give birth) is the science of genes, heredity, and the variation of organisms. ... For other uses, see inheritance (disambiguation). ...

In botany, his auctorial abbreviation is Lam.

See also: Trofim Lysenko Trofim Lysenko Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (Russian: Трофи́м Дени́сович Лысе́нко) (September 29, 1898–November 20, 1976) was a Soviet biologist who, during the 1930s, led a campaign against agricultural genetics now known as Lysenkoism, which lasted until the mid-1960s in the USSR. Biography Lysenko, the son of Denis and Oksana...

¹ For a discussion of linguistic priority, see History of the word Biology. Main article: Life There are many universal units and common processes that are fundamental to the known forms of life. ...

External links

• Lamarck's works and heritage (in English) (http://www.lamarck.net)
• Lamarck's books (complete collection in full text) with search engine. (http://www.crhst.cnrs.fr/i-corpus/lamarck/ice/ice_book_list.php?lang=en&type=text&bdd=crhst_i_lamarck&table=ouvrages_lamarck&typeofbookId=1&num=0)
• Lamarck's herbarium for botanists (http://www.crhst.cnrs.fr/i-corpus/lamarck/herbier.php?lang=en)