Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Quotes

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck , often known simply as Lamarck , was a French naturalist. He was a soldier, biologist, and academic, and an early proponent of the idea that biological evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws.

Lamarck fought in the Pomeranian War against Prussia, and was awarded a commission for bravery on the battlefield. Posted to Monaco, Lamarck became interested in natural history and resolved to study medicine. He 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 françoise , he gained membership of the French Academy of Sciences in 1779. Lamarck became involved in the Jardin des Plantes and was appointed to the Chair of Botany in 1788. When the French National Assembly founded the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in 1793, Lamarck became a professor of zoology.

In 1801, he published Système des animaux sans vertèbres, a major work on the classification of invertebrates, a term he coined. In an 1802 publication, he became one of the first to use the term "biology" in its modern sense. Lamarck continued his work as a premier authority on invertebrate zoology. He is remembered, at least in malacology, as a taxonomist of considerable stature.

The modern era generally remembers Lamarck for a theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics, called Lamarckism , soft inheritance, or use/disuse theory, which he described in his 1809 Philosophie Zoologique. However, the idea of soft inheritance long antedates him, formed only a small element of his theory of evolution, and was in his time accepted by many natural historians. Lamarck's contribution to evolutionary theory consisted of the first truly cohesive theory of biological evolution, in which an alchemical complexifying force drove organisms up a ladder of complexity, and a second environmental force adapted them to local environments through use and disuse of characteristics, differentiating them from other organisms. Scientists have debated whether advances in the field of transgenerational epigenetics mean that Lamarck was to an extent correct, or not. Wikipedia  

✵ 1. August 1744 – 18. December 1829
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck photo

Works

Philosophie Zoologique
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: 3   quotes 0   likes

Famous Jean-Baptiste Lamarck Quotes

“What nature does in the course of long periods we do every day when we suddenly change the environment in which some species of living plant is situated.”

Ce que la nature fait avec beaucoup de temps, nous le faisons tous les jours, en changeant nous-mêmes subitement, par rapport à un végétal vivant, les circonstances dans lesquelles lui et tous les individus de son espèce se rencontroient.
Philosophie Zoologique, Vol. I (1809), p. 226; translation by Hugh Elliot, Zoological Philosophy: An Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals (1914), p. 109.

“We know that this animal [the giraffe], the tallest of mammals, dwells in the interior of Africa, in places where the soil, almost always arid and without herbage, obliges it to browse on trees and to strain itself continuously to reach them. This habit sustained for long, has had the result in all members of its race that the forelegs have grown longer than the hind legs and that its neck has become so stretched, that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, lifts its head to a height of six meters.”

On sait que cet animal, le plus grand des mammifères, habite l'intérieur de l'Afrique, et qu'il vit dans des lieux où la terre, presque toujours aride et sans herbage, l'oblige de brouter le feuillage des arbres, et de s'efforcer continuellement d'y atteindre. Il est résulté de cette habitude soutenue depuis longtemps, dans tous les individus de sa race, que ses jambes de devant sont devenues plus longues que celles de derrière, et que son col s'est tellement allongé, que la girafe, sans se dresser sur ses jambes de derrière, élève sa tête et atteint à six mètres de hauteur
Philosophie Zoologique, Vol. I (1809), pp. 256–257; translation taken from The Classics of Science: A Study of Twelve Enduring Scientific Works (1984) by Derek Gjertsen, p. 316.

Similar authors

Claude Adrien Helvétius photo
Claude Adrien Helvétius 8
French philosopher
Jean De La Fontaine photo
Jean De La Fontaine 47
French poet, fabulist and writer.
Pierre Beaumarchais photo
Pierre Beaumarchais 11
French playwright diplomat and polymath
Nicolas Chamfort photo
Nicolas Chamfort 54
French writer
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues photo
Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues 60
French writer, a moralist
Maximilien Robespierre photo
Maximilien Robespierre 78
French revolutionary lawyer and politician
Joseph Joubert photo
Joseph Joubert 253
French moralist and essayist
Marquis de Sade photo
Marquis de Sade 30
French novelist and philosopher
Baron d'Holbach photo
Baron d'Holbach 9
French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist
Jean de La Bruyère photo
Jean de La Bruyère 65
17th-century French writer and philosopher