Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck, was a French naturalist, soldier, and academic whose intellectual audacity anticipated the theory of biological evolution by half a century. After heroic military service in the Seven Years' War, Lamarck studied botany under Bernard de Jussieu, publishing a comprehensive flora of France that won him admission to the Académie des Sciences.

Appointed professor of natural history of insects and worms at the newly founded Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, Lamarck coined the term invertebrates and organized their classification. In 1802, he coined the word biologie to denote the overarching science of living organisms. In his 1809 masterwork Philosophie zoologique, Lamarck presented the first coherent, comprehensive theory of organic transmutation: proposing that species are not immutable creations, but evolve over vast epochs driven by internal striving and the adaptation of organs through use and disuse (Lamarckism). Although his mechanism of inheritance was later supplanted by Darwinian natural selection, modern epigenetics has rediscovered Lamarckian aspects of gene regulation.