Lamarck was born in the small town of Bazentin in northern France, the scion of an

impoverished aristocratic family. He served in the military during the Seven Years
War and, at the age of only 17, was awarded a commission for bravery in
recognition of his actions on the battlefield. It was at this point that Jean-Baptiste
Pierre Antoine de Monet (Lamarck's given name) became the Chevalier de Lamarck,
or Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the name by which he was thereafter known.

Later, when Lamarck retired injured, he took up a new career in natural history. He
first studied botany under the naturalist Bernard de Jussieu. The eventual product of
this ten-year period of research was Lamarck's Flore franoise (1778), a threevolume work on the plant life of France that brought its author into the front rank of
French naturalists.

Illustrations of scallops from Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's Tableau encyclopdique et

mthodique des trois rgnes de la nature, 1782-1832.

Illustrations of starfish from Lamarck's Tableau encyclopdique et mthodique des

trois rgnes de la nature, 1782-1832.

Lamarck eventually obtained a position at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, and later
at the Musum national d'Histoire naturelle where he became a professor of
zoology. In 1801, he published Systme des Animaux sans Vertebres, a landmark in
invertebrate taxonomy. It was he who originated the distinction between
vertebrates and invertebrates, and who introduced many still-existing major
divisions of the latter category, such as crustaceans, arachnids and annelids.

Lamarck's theory of evolution. Lamarck is now best remembered for his proposals
concerning evolution. He was the first scientist to formally propose a gradualistic
theory of evolution (as opposed to saltationist theories of evolution such as that
proposed earlier by Linnaeus). As Darwin (Origin, 3rd ed., p. xiii) put it, "Lamarck
was the first man whose conclusions on this subject excited much attention. This
justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801, and he much

enlarged them in 1809 in his Philosophie Zoologique, and subsequently, in 1815, in

his Introduction to his Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertbres. In these works he
upholds the doctrine that all species, including man, are descended from other

species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of
all changes in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law,
and not of miraculous interposition.
In his theory, Lamarck assumed that simple microscopic forms of life continuously
arise spontaneously from nonliving matter. This notion that spontaneous generation
occurs on an ongoing basis was still widely accepted in his day. But he further
supposed that such forms had an innate tendency gradually to evolve over time into
organisms of ever greater complexity. This was something no one else had said.
Thus in 1803, he comments, "Do we not therefore see that through the action of the
laws of organization ... nature has in favorable times, places, and climates
multiplied the first germs of animal life, and allowed their organization to
develop, ... and increased and diversified their organs? Then, ... aided by much time
and by a slow and ongoing diversity of circumstances, she has gradually brought
about in this way the state of things which we now observe. How grand is this
consideration, and especially how distant is it from what is generally thought on this
subject!

Under Lamarck's theory, traits could arise, or become more developed, through the
use of an organ or portion of the body. For example, he said the necks of giraffes
had gotten longer as they were used to stretch ever higher for leaves. Traits could
also diminish, he claimed, through "disuse." In this way any organ that went unused
would tend to shrink with the passing generations. For example, he said blind cave
fish had become blind because their ancestors had not used their eyes.

This notion, that traits acquired in an individual's lifetime in response to exercise or

environmental stimuli could be passed on to descendant generations, was not new.
In those days, many people, even scientists, thought acquired traits could be
inherited (indeed, that very school of thought, despite it's long being out of
intellectual fashion, is again garnering adherents today).
But many other scientists opposed the idea, most prominently Cuvier. They ridiculed
the idea with farcical scenarios such as cowboys fathering bowlegged babies or
weight lifters producing muscle-bound children. However, many naturalists freely
embraced the idea, including Darwin himself. For example, in the Origin (1859, pp.
479-480) he asserts that "Disuse, aided sometimes by natural selection, will often
tend to reduce an organ, when it has become useless by changed habits or under
changed conditions of life. But Lamarck did not consider the inheritance of acquired
traits crucial to his theory. The essential idea was an ongoing transformation of
forms tending toward ever higher levels of complexity under the influence of natural
laws.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in profile (etching by his friend Dr. Cachet)

He originated the idea of arranging organisms into genealogical trees of descent. As
Locy (1915, pp. 131-132) notes, Lamarck "was the first to employ a genealogical
tree and to break up the serial arrangement of animal forms. In 1809, in the second
volume of his Philosophie Zoologique, as Packard has pointed out, he arranged
animals according to their relationships, in the form of a trunk with divergent
branches. This was no vague suggestion on his part, but an actual pictorial
representation of the relationship between different groups of animals, as conceived
by him. Although a crude attempt, it is interesting as being the first of its kind. This
is so directly opposed to the idea of scale of being that we make note of the fact
that Lamarck forsook that view at least twenty years before the close of his life and
substituted for it that of the genealogical tree.
Lamarck (circa 1802)
It is perhaps no coincidence that a former soldier, decorated for courage on the field
of battle, was also the first scientist to suggest explicitly that human beings had
evolved from apes (Philosophie Zoologique, 1809): "Certainly, if some race of apes,
especially the most perfect among them, lost, by necessity of circumstances, or
some other cause, the habit of climbing trees and grasping branches with the feet,
, and if the individuals of that race, over generations, were forced to use their
feet only for walking and ceased to use their hands as feet, doubtless these apes
would be transformed into two-handed beings and their feet would no longer
serve any purpose other than to walk.

Perhaps he was a bit too courageous his free tongue made him enemies among
the very men who could have promoted his career Jean-Baptiste Lamarck died in
penury and ended in a rented grave. His remains were later exhumed when the fiveyear lease expired, and their ultimate destination is now unknown.