Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: Biography Of This French Naturalist
If we talk about evolution, probably the first name that comes to mind is Charles Darwin. However Darwin was not the only great author who worked on this aspect there are other authors with a different consideration of the evolution of species and who even served as inspiration.
The most prominent of all, despite the fact that with the passage of time his ideas became obsolete and lost popularity in favor of other theories with greater scientific support, is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.
This man, one of the first pioneers to separate the development of species from faith, the father of the term biology as we know it and is the author of one of the first truly coherent and integrated evolutionary theories. Understanding his life can greatly help us evaluate his thoughts, which is why throughout this article Let’s sketch a brief biography of Lamarck as well as its scientific legacy.
Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet cavaliere di Lamarck, better known as Lamarck, was born in the village of Bazentín (in the region of Picardy, Somme) on August 1, 1744. Son of Philippe Jacques de Monet de La Marck and Marie-Françoise de Fontaines de Chuignolles, He was the eleventh son of a noble family dedicated to the military establishment
His father decided to enroll young Lamarck in a Jesuit seminary so that he could dedicate his life to the priesthood. The young man would remain with them and would receive education and training in different subjects within the ecclesiastical career. However, when his father died in 1759, Lamarck decided to leave the habit and join the military establishment.
Military service and further studies
When he turned seventeen, in 1761, he acquired a horse and enlisted in the army. His military career was short but intense, being promoted to officer during his first year in the army and participating in the Seven Years’ War. He became a knight. However in 1768 suffered a significant neck injury that, after causing scrofula (an infection in the lymph nodes of the neck that generates great inflammation) would force him to end his military career.
He moved to Paris, where he would initially live off his father’s pension and inheritance with his brother Philippe François. There he began studying music, but finally decided to later work as an accountant.
After that he decided to study medicine for four years, a period in which he would also receive training in what would become one of his great passions: botany. It would be in this and in the natural sciences in which he would show greatest interest, specializing in the study of it and participating in the herbalizations studied by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Botany and the rise of its prestige
Such was his interest that he would carry out important research work based on the observation of plants, inventing in the process the so-called dichotomous method in order to systematically classify the flora of France. This work would be published in 1779 under the name “Flore françois”, thanks to Count Georges Louis Buffon. Over time and largely thanks to the popularity achieved thanks to said publication He was appointed member of the Academy of Sciences
Lamarck was contacted by Buffon in 1780 to lead a mission to Europe to increase the botanical collection of the Jardin du Roi (of the king), which he carried out successfully. Since then, the author worked as a botanist in said garden until 1793 in what was known as the Jardin du Roi (King’s Garden). At this time he would marry Marie Annie Rosalie Delaforte, with whom he would have five children and who unfortunately died in 1792.
That same garden, with the arrival of the French Revolution and largely thanks to his influence, it would be transformed into the National Museum of Natural History In it he would be appointed by the Committee of Public Instruction as Director or professor of the department of lower animals.
This department was in charge of the study of insects and other animals that today we call invertebrates. In fact, this same concept was created by him to define animals that do not have vertebrae: throughout his studies he would elaborate the main subdivisions that still exist today.
In addition to that, He also coined the term biology to identify the science that studies living beings That year 1793 he would also marry for the second time, this time to Victoire Charlotte Reverdy, with whom he would have two more children. However, this second wife died a few years later, in 1797. A year later he married Julie Mallet for the third time.
In addition to beginning to teach, during this time he would produce what would be one of his most recognized works, the “Natural History of Invertebrates”, which would consist of various volumes that were produced between 1815 and 1822. And in the studies that carried out during this time is the germ that would end up producing his theory of evolution.
His work in meteorology
Another of the branches in which he began to work was meteorology, being a pioneer in assessing that weather prediction was possible through probabilistic methods. In this area, he believed that understanding what generates atmospheric alterations allows us to predict the behavior of the climate with some accuracy.
Some of the possible causes of the atmospheric phenomena that he proposed were the influence of the Sun and the Moon, as well as the rotation of the Earth. However, in this sense he published several Meteorological Yearbooks, in which various errors were found and which in fact are considered his least accurate works. It would be then that he would begin to suffer a certain discredit.
Lamarckism
Although initially Lamarck considered that living beings did not undergo any changes, over time and research he began to harbor the idea that there was actually an evolutionary process: living beings have not been created and remain immutable but have varied from simpler beings that precede them.
Likewise, I would consider that the organs and characteristics of different beings atrophy or develop according to their use, and that the characteristics acquired by the ancestor organisms that are useful are transmitted to their offspring (the best-known example being the neck of the giraffes). He considers that it is habit and necessity that cause organisms to modify.
His ideas about the evolution and inheritance of acquired characteristics they saw the light in Zoological philosophy, published in 1809, and which is the first theoretical body that brings together the knowledge of the time regarding evolution. This document was and continues to be of great historical relevance, allowing debate at a time when biology was still strongly associated with creationism.
However, it also caused him suffering: he offered a copy to Napoleon Bonaparte, who would reject it in public. Furthermore, at this stage his health began to decline, and he also had several conflicts and disputes with various authors that little by little diminished his prestige: criticized Lavoisier’s work regarding the functioning of fluids his works were criticized as unscientific and biased and it was said that he overvalued his arguments.
He also became deeply entangled with the biologist Georges Cuvier, who enjoyed very good public consideration and who started from a more empirical and experimental base, going so far as to describe Lamarck’s theories as nonsense.
Unfortunately for Lamarck, as the years passed His numerous contributions to evolution were falling into disrepute From 1819 he became blind, in fact having to dictate some of his works to his daughters. In addition to this, his third wife, Julio Maillet, would die at this time. All of this, along with the collapse of the author’s low prestige, caused him to become poorer and eventually fall ill.
His last years of life were spent caring for his daughters, ignored and with hardly any type of recognition. His death occurred on December 18, 1829, at the age of 85, in Paris.
Despite the fact that Lamarck’s theory of evolution has been outdated and surpassed by Darwin’s and that in the last years of his life he was discredited and ignored, with the passage of time His ideas have been seen as an important advance in scientific knowledge from the time in which he lived and has served as the basis for multiple theories. Furthermore, although he is not as well known, his are concepts and classifications such as that of invertebrates, or the term biology, in addition to contributing greatly to the development of both botany and zoology.
