50 Facts About Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck retired from the army after being injured in 1766, and returned to his medical studies.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck developed a particular interest in botany, and later, after he published the three-volume work Flore francoise, he gained membership of the French Academy of Sciences in 1779.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck became involved in the Jardin des Plantes and was appointed to the Chair of Botany in 1788.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck continued his work as a premier authority on invertebrate zoology.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is remembered, at least in malacology, as a taxonomist of considerable stature.

Scientists have debated whether advances in the field of transgenerational epigenetics mean that Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was to an extent correct, or not.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was born in Bazentin, Picardy, northern France, as the 11th child in an impoverished aristocratic family.

Male members of the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck family had traditionally served in the French army.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck showed great physical courage on the battlefield in the Seven Years' War with Prussia, and he was even nominated for the lieutenancy.

One of the men suggested that the puny, 17-year-old volunteer should assume command and order a withdrawal from the field; although Jean-Baptiste Lamarck accepted command, he insisted they remain where they had been posted until relieved.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was awarded a commission and settled at his post in Monaco.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck attempted to study medicine, and supported himself by working in a bank office.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck studied medicine for four years, but gave it up under his elder brother's persuasion.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was interested in botany, especially after his visits to the Jardin du Roi, and he became a student under Bernard de Jussieu, a notable French naturalist.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's work was respected by many scholars, and it launched him into prominence in French science.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one of the top French scientists of the day, mentored Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and helped him gain membership to the French Academy of Sciences in 1779 and a commission as a royal botanist in 1781, in which he traveled to foreign botanical gardens and museums.

In 1790, at the height of the French Revolution, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck changed the name of the Royal Garden from Jardin du Roi to Jardin des Plantes, a name that did not imply such a close association with King Louis XVI.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had worked as the keeper of the herbarium for five years before he was appointed curator and professor of invertebrate zoology at the Museum national d'histoire naturelle in 1793.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck began as an essentialist who believed species were unchanging; however, 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.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck set out to develop an explanation, and on 11 May 1800, he presented a lecture at the Museum national d'histoire naturelle in which he first outlined his newly developing ideas about evolution.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck categorized echinoderms, arachnids, crustaceans, and annelids, which he separated from the old taxon for worms known as Vermes.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first to separate arachnids from insects in classification, and he moved crustaceans into a separate class from insects.

In 1802 Jean-Baptiste Lamarck published Hydrogeologie, and became one of the first to use the term biology in its modern sense.

In Hydrogeologie, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck advocated a steady-state geology based on a strict uniformitarianism.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 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.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck 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.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck came into conflict with the widely respected palaeontologist Georges Cuvier, who was not a supporter of evolution.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck gradually turned blind; he died in Paris on 18 December 1829.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was buried in a common grave of the Montparnasse cemetery for just five years, according to the grant obtained from relatives.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck stressed two main themes in his biological work.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck cited examples of blindness in moles, the presence of teeth in mammals and the absence of teeth in birds as evidence of this principle.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck outlined his theories regarding evolution first in his Floreal lecture of 1800, and then in three later published works:.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck employed several mechanisms as drivers of evolution, drawn from the common knowledge of his day and from his own belief in the chemistry before Lavoisier.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck used these mechanisms to explain the two forces he saw as constituting evolution: force driving animals from simple to complex forms and a force adapting animals to their local environments and differentiating them from each other.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed that these forces must be explained as a necessary consequence of basic physical principles, favoring a materialistic attitude toward biology.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck referred to a tendency for organisms to become more complex, moving "up" a ladder of progress.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck referred to this phenomenon as Le pouvoir de la vie or la force qui tend sans cesse a composer l'organisation.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck believed in the ongoing spontaneous generation of simple living organisms through action on physical matter by a material life force.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck ran against the modern chemistry promoted by Lavoisier, preferring to embrace a more traditional alchemical view of the elements as influenced primarily by earth, air, fire, and water.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck asserted that once living organisms form, the movements of fluids in living organisms naturally drove them to evolve toward ever greater levels of complexity:.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that organisms thus moved from simple to complex in a steady, predictable way based on the fundamental physical principles of alchemy.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck saw spontaneous generation as being ongoing, with the simple organisms thus created being transmuted over time becoming more complex.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is sometimes regarded as believing in a teleological process where organisms became more perfect as they evolved, though as a materialist, he emphasized that these forces must originate necessarily from underlying physical principles.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck argued that this adaptive force was powered by the interaction of organisms with their environment, by the use and disuse of certain characteristics.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is known largely for his views on evolution, which have been dismissed in favour of developments in Darwinism.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is usually remembered for his belief in the then commonly held theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the use and disuse model by which organisms developed their characteristics.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck incorporated this belief into his theory of evolution, along with other common beliefs of the time, such as spontaneous generation.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck constructed one of the first theoretical frameworks of organic evolution.

Developments in epigenetics, the study of cellular and physiological traits that are heritable by daughter cells and not caused by changes in the DNA sequence, have caused debate about whether a "neolamarckist" view of inheritance could be correct: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was not in a position to give a molecular explanation for his theory.