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Jean Lamarck (1744 - 1829)

    In full, Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, was an 18th century French evolutionist, best known for his "Zoological Philosophy" (1809), in which he advanced the first modern theory of evolution, by which species were transformed over time into other species.

    Lamarck's theory was not well received, for several reasons. He was a member of the French aristocracy, but during the French Revolution sided with the revolutionists, which earned him the enmity and distrust of conservatives on the Continent and especially in England. He included in his theory a concept of inheritance of acquired characteristics, and famously included a very brief, hypothetical passage about the evolution of Giraffes. He suggested that they had acquired their long necks by stretching to reach higher leaves of the trees they fed on, and that the changes so produced were passed on to their offspring and later generations. In English editions, the "besoin" of the Giraffe was inaccurately translated as "need" rather than "want", which was thought by many to suggest a teleological (goal-oriented) motivation. (Satirists suggested the theory could as easily be used to explain why trees were so tall). Finally, the book was intended as a 'philosophical' work, and as such was unsupported by any empirical evidence, unlike Darwin's Origin of Species fifty years later.