50 Facts About Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, often known simply as Lamarck, was a French naturalist, biologist, academic, and soldier.

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

Lamarck fought in the Seven Years' War against Prussia, and was awarded a commission for bravery on the battlefield.

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

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.

Related searches

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lamarck's company was left exposed to the direct artillery fire of their enemies, and was quickly reduced to just 14 men—with no officers.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Related searches

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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:.

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

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

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.

Related searches

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

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

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.

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

Lamarck constructed one of the first theoretical frameworks of organic evolution.