Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
From Philosopedia
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet [Chevalier de] (1 August 1744 - 28 December 1829)
A French naturalist who was an early proponent of the idea the evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws, Lamarck was one of the first to use biology in its modern sense.
Lamarck was born in Bazentn-le-Petit, Picardy, France, and was educated at the Jesuit College in Amiens. He left the seminary to join the Army and fight in Germany. After five years of service, he was injured and turned to the study of botany. He was appointed Royal Botanist in 1781 and became professor of invertebrate zoology at the Natural History Museum in 1793.
The first to coin the word "invertebrate," he wrote Philosophie Zoologique (1809), proposing an early theory of evolution, a now-discredited but thoughtful theory on the inheritance of acquired traits. His theory of acquired characteristics, that the giraffe’s neck eventually extended out of need to reach high, for example, was rejected once the principles of heredity were established. His contribution mainly is that at a time when most naturalists advocated divine creation and the fixity of species, he championed the evolutionary framework that Charles Darwin later propounded. The two differed, especially in their view of the part played by “appetency” (organic changes resulting from environmental pressures) and the active exertion of the organism.
Darwin and others eventually hailed Lamarck, who died in obscurity and poverty, for doing 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."
A Deist in the classical sense, he wrote,
- All knowledge that is not the real product of observation, or of consequences deduced from observation, is entirely groundless and illusory.
According to Joseph McCabe, “The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that he was a Catholic but even the anti-evolutionary Quatrefages said that he was ‘essentially deistic,’ and no Catholic of Lamarck’s time could be an evolutionist. In some passages, in fact, he is practically agnostic.”
Several years before his death, Lamarck became blind.
{FFRF; BDF; CE; EU, H. James Birx; JM; RAT; RE; TYD}
