Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who proposed that organisms change through use and disuse and pass acquired traits to their offspring.

Inheritance of acquired characteristics: The proposed transmission of traits acquired during an organism’s life to its offspring. Lamarck made this inheritance principle central to how species change.
Enlightenment: An intellectual movement emphasizing reason, inquiry, and criticism of inherited authority in eighteenth-century Europe. Lamarck’s career unfolded amid its expanding culture of natural inquiry.
Charles Darwin: An English naturalist who explained adaptation and species diversification through natural selection. Darwin accepted some inheritance of acquired effects but made natural selection central.
Philosophie zoologique: Lamarck’s 1809 book presenting his theory of species change and the inheritance of acquired traits. It is the fullest statement of the evolutionary framework associated with Lamarck.
Modern synthesis: The twentieth-century framework integrating Mendelian genetics with Darwinian evolution by natural selection. It explains evolutionary change through genetic variation rather than Lamarck’s use-and-disuse inheritance.
Use and disuse: The idea that frequently used organs become stronger while unused organs diminish. Lamarck proposed that these changes could shape organisms and be inherited.
Jardin des Plantes: A botanical garden and natural history institution in Paris, founded in 1635. Lamarck worked at this institution after the French Revolution reorganized its collections.
Georges Cuvier: A French anatomist who established extinction and opposed the transmutation of species. Cuvier’s influential resistance helped marginalize Lamarck’s evolutionary theory.
Lamarckism: Evolutionary theories that explain inherited change through use, disuse, and acquired characteristics. The label names the family of ideas derived from Lamarck’s evolutionary proposals.
Mendelian inheritance: The transmission of discrete hereditary factors according to patterns first established by Gregor Mendel. It replaced acquired bodily modifications with hereditary variation as a foundation of evolutionary theory.

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