Jean-Baptiste Lamarck: biography of this French naturalist

If we talk about evolution, the first name that comes to mind is probably that of Charles Darwin. Nevertheless Darwin was not the only great author who worked on this aspect, There are other authors with a different consideration of the evolution of the species and that even served as inspiration.

The most outstanding of all, despite the fact that with the passage of time his ideas remained obsolete and losing popularity in favor of other theories with greater scientific endorsement, 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 he is the author of one of the first really coherent evolutionary theories and integrated. Understanding his life can help us greatly to value his thinking, which is why throughout this article let's sketch a short biography of Lamarckas well as his scientific legacy.

• Related article: "Lamarck's Theory and the Evolution of Species"

Short biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet cavaliere di Lamarck, better known as Lamarck, was born in the village of Bazentín (in the Picardy region of the 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 in order to dedicate his life to the priesthood. The young man would remain with them and would receive an education and training in different subjects within the ecclesiastical career. However, when his father died in 1759, Lamarck decided to drop his habits and join the military establishment.

Military service and further studies

When he was 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 he suffered a major neck injury that, after generating scrofula (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 on a pension and paternal inheritance with his brother Philippe François. There he began music studies, but finally decided to later work as an accountant.

After that, he decided to study medicine for four years., a period in which he too would 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 manifest the greatest interest, specializing in his study 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 an 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 a 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 successfully completed. The author worked since then as a botanist in said garden until 1793 in the one known as Jardin du Roi (of the King). At this time he would marry Marie Annie Rosalie Delaforte, with whom he would have five children and who unfortunately passed away 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 Public Instruction Committee 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 is created by him to define animals that do not have vertebrae: throughout his studies he would elaborate the main subdivisions that still exist today.

Besides that, he also coined the term biology to identify the science that studies living things. That year 1793 he would also marry for the second time, this time with Victoire Charlotte Reverdy, with whom he would have two more children. However, this second wife died within a few years, in 1797. A year later he would contract his third marriage with Julie Mallet.

In addition to beginning to teach, during this time he would develop what would be one of his most recognized works, the "Natural history of invertebrates", which would consist of various volumes that were developed between 1815 until 1822. And in the studies that he carried out during this time is the germ that would end up producing his theory of evolution.

His work in meteorology

Another branch in which he began to work was meteorology, being the pioneer in assessing that it was possible to predict the weather through probabilistic methods. In this area, he believed that understanding what generates atmospheric disturbances 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 various meteorological Yearbooks, in which various errors were found and which in fact are considered his less exact works. It would be then when he began to suffer a certain discredit.

Lamarckism

Although initially Lamarck considered that living beings did not undergo any change, over time and research was sheltering the idea that an evolutionary process actually existed: living beings have not been created and remain unchanged but have been changing from simpler beings that precede them.

Likewise, it would consider that the organs and characteristics of different beings are atrophying or developing 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 change.

His ideas on evolution and inheritance of acquired characteristics saw the light in Zoological philosophy, published in 1809, and which is the first theoretical body that brings together the knowledge of the time in relation to evolution. This document was and still is of great historical relevance, allowing debate at a time when biology was still strongly associated with creationism.

• You may be interested: "The theory of biological evolution"

Fall from grace, last years and death

However, it also caused him suffering: he offered a copy to Napoleon Bonaparte, who would reject it in public. Also at this stage his health began to decline, and he also had several conflicts and disputes with various authors that little by little were reducing his prestige: he criticized Lavoisier's work on the workings of fluids, his works were dismissed as unscientific and biased and it was said that he overvalued his arguments.

He, too, deeply antagonized the biologist Georges Cuvier, who enjoyed very good public regard and that he started from a more empirical and experimental basis, going so far as to describe Lamarck's theories as nonsense.

Unfortunately for Lamarck, over the years the numerous contributions of him in the matter of evolution were being discredited. From 1819 on he became blind, in fact having to dictate some of his works to his daughters. In addition to this, Julio Maillet's third wife would die at this time. All this, together with the sinking of the author's little prestige, caused him to become impoverished and he ended up becoming ill.

The last years of his life were spent in the care of his daughters, ignored and with hardly any kind 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 it 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. In addition, although it is not so well known, its are concepts and classifications such as that of invertebrates, or the term of biology, in addition to contributing greatly to both the development of botany and zoology.