Top 101 Scientists by Elizabeth Lachner

Author:Elizabeth Lachner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Britannica Educational Publishing
Published: 2016-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

JEAN-BAPTISTE LAMARCK

(b. 1744–d. 1829)

The man who coined the word biologie (“biology”) and one of the pioneers in that field was a French scientist named Lamarck. He is remembered most for his theory of evolution, that proposed that the characteristics an organism develops during its lifetime in response to its environment are inherited by, or passed on to, its offspring. Charles Darwin’s theories, published 30 years after Lamarck’s death, disagreed with Lamarck’s conclusions, which were later discarded by most scientists as invalid.

Jean-Baptiste de Monet Lamarck was born on August 1, 1744, in Picardy. After his schooling he served in the French army from 1761 to 1768, during which time he became interested in botany and the classification of plants. In 1778 he published a three-volume work on the plants of France. After the start of the French Revolution in 1789, Lamarck promoted and became one of the originators of the Museum of Natural History, founded in Paris in 1793. He was placed in charge of the invertebrate animals at the museum, and from his work was able to revise the classification of lower animals that had been unfinished by the Swedish biologist Carolus Linnaeus. His continued study of invertebrates led to the publication of his major work, Histoire naturelle des animaux sans vertèbres (The Natural History of Invertebrate Animals, published in 1815–22). Although Lamarck’s theories on evolution were discarded after Darwin, he succeeded in establishing procedures of inquiry for the study of invertebrates that were useful long after his death.

Lamarck was a generalist in science at a time when specialization was emerging. He sought the unities that underlie the natural world. This led to his increasing isolation from other scientists. He died lonely and in poverty in Paris on December 18, 1829.

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