Lamarck

Jean Baptiste Lamarck was the first scientist to come up with the idea of evolution (though a different version than Darwin's). Lamarck suggested that giraffes got long necks by stretching to reach trees, when clearly they got long necks because God wanted them to be long. Lamarck is now an object of derision amongst scientists, much like Darwin will be in a year or two.

Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet was born in the village of Bazentin-le-Petit in the north of France, on August 1, 1744. He was the youngest of eleven children in a family with a centuries-old tradition of military service; his father and several of his brothers were soldiers.

The young Lamarck entered the Jesuit seminary at Amiens around 1756, but not long after his father's death, Lamarck rode off to join the French army campaigning in Germany in the summer of 1761; in his first battle, he distinguished himself for bravery under fire and was promoted to officer.

After peace was declared in 1763, Lamarck spent five years on garrison duty in the south of France, until an accidental injury forced him to leave the army. After working as a bank clerk in Paris for a while, Lamarck began to study medicine and botany, at which he rapidly became expert; in 1778 his book on the plants of France, Flore Française, was published to great acclaim, in part thanks to the support of Buffon.

On the strength of Flore Française, Lamarck was made assistant botanist at the royal botanical garden, the Jardin des Plantes. In 1793, his became the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle (National Museum of Natural History). This institution boasted 12 professors in 12 different scientific fields. Lamarck was appointed professor of the natural history of insects and worms, something he knew nothing about at the time! It was also seen as the lowliest position, since few naturalists of the 18th Century considered insects and worms worthy of study.

Lamarck, however, proved equal to the task and was responsible for coining the term Invertebrate. In effect, he creatred a whole new field of biology with his studies. In 1803, after 10 years of study, he lectured his students that:

we perceive that, relative to the animal kingdom, we should chiefly devote our attention to the invertebrate animals, because their enormous multiplicity in nature, the singular diversity of their systems of organization, and of their means of multiplication, . . . , show us, much better than the higher animals, the true course of nature, and the means which she has used and which she still unceasingly employs to give existence to all the living bodies of which we have knowledge.

Lamarck published a series of books on invertebrate zoology and paleontology. Of these, Philosophie zoologique, published in 1809, most clearly states Lamarck's theories of evolution. The first volume of Histoire naturelle des Animaux sans vertèbres was published in 1815, the second in 1822. Aside from Lamarck's contributions to evolutionary theory, his works on invertebrates represent a great advance over existing classifications; he was the first to separate the Crustacea, Arachnida, and Annelida from the Insecta. His classification of the mollusks was far in advance of anything proposed previously; Lamarck broke with tradition in removing the tunicates and the barnacles from the Mollusca. He also anticipated the work of Schleiden & Schwann in cell theory in stating that:

no body can have life if its constituent parts are not cellular tissue or are not formed by cellular tissue.

Lamarck even found time to write papers on physics and meteorology, including some annual compilations of weather data.