Lamarck and Theory of Evolution

From Paris Hotels Reviews

Lamarck and Theory of Evolution

Outside the paleontology museum in the Jardion des Plantes a statue rises above the proud legend “Founder of the Doctrine of Evolution”. The fact that the man portrayed is one Jean-Baptise Lamarck rather than a certain rather more celebrated Englishman says a lot about cultural perspective. Born in 1744, Lamarck began his career as an assistant at Paris’s Jardin des Plantes. When the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle was set up after the Revoluiton, he was promoted to the proud post of professor of worms and insects. By 1809, the same year Charles Darwin was born, he had worked out a radical theory that animal species could adapt in response to environmental pressures. But his work received only moderate recognition, and he died blind and poor (and surrounded by daughters from four marriages) in 1829 – two years before Darwin set sail in the Beagie. Many of Lamarck’s ideas have been disproved or abandoned – notably that traits acquired during an animal’s lifetime can be inherited – but he was nevertheless the first scientist to give birth to the great evolutionary idea. As such, the little under his statue couldn’t be more apt.