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Lamarck
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Lamarck's chemical theories are usually dismissed as the product of unfortunate speculation because they represented the "old chemistry" overturned by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier and the "chemical revolution." However, they provide the key to his conception of nature and are essential features of his theory of evolution. Lamarck began his work in chemistry in the 1770s, when the four-element theory of matter (earth, air, fire, water) was still generally accepted in France. The fact that the most important element in his system was fire in its various states of modification allowed Lamarck to explain most of the known chemical and physical phenomena. His chemistry was ... used to explain the mechanical interaction of individuals with the environment and, thus, evolution and the emergence of higher mental faculties.
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Lamarck was the first man whose conclusions [concerning the origin of species] excited much attention. This justly-celebrated naturalist first published his views in 1801, and he much enlarged them in 1809 in his "Philosophie Zoologique," and subsequently, in 1815, in his Introduction to his "Hist. Nat. des Animaux sans Vertébres." In these works he upholds the doctrine that species, including man, are descended from other species. He first did the eminent service of arousing attention to the probability of all change in the organic, as well as in the inorganic world, being the result of law, and not of miraculous interposition.
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Lamarck had a curious personal life, of which surprisingly little is known, when compared with other French scientists of the time. He only married Marie Delaporte, the mother of his first six children, on her deathbed in 1792, after being together since 1777. He married again in 1795 (his second wife, Charlotte, died in 1797), and again to Julie Mallet (d.1819) in 1798. He is rumoured to have married (and been widowed) a fourth time, but no documentary evidence exists to support this. The two daughters who tended his deathbed were left penniless at his death; one surviving son was deaf and incapable and another was insane. Only one son, Auguste, was financially successful as an engineer, and only he went on to marry and have children himself.
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Born into a military family, Lamarck had a brief career as a soldier before turning his attention to medicine and science. His Flore Française (1778) on the plants of France brought him to the attention of French naturalist Comte de Buffon (Count Buffon), who became his sponsor in scientific circles. He was appointed professor at the National Museum of Natural History, in charge of insects and "worms," meaning all invertebrates. Lamarck was the first to propose separating the arachnids (spiders), mollusks, and crustaceans from the insects, placing them in separate classes.
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Under the patronage of the naturalist Georges Louis Leclerc Buffon, who secured the necessary government funding, Lamarck published Flore François (1779; “Plants of France”). This book provided an easy reference guide for amateur botanists, but ... took issue with some of the problems of the artificial classification schemes of Carolus Linnaeus. The success of the book, and his friendship with Buffon, led to Lamarck’s election to the Academy of Sciences. He became an associate botanist in 1783, but he conducted his most significant research after beginning to work at the Jardin du Roi (King's Garden) in 1788. During the French Revolution, when the garden was reorganized (1793), Lamarck's ideas helped to frame the structure of the new Museum of Natural History. Ironically, under the new system Lamarck was obliged to give up botany and became professor of insects and worms, a division he named “invertebrate zoology”.
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Lamarck's theoretical observations on evolution, referred to in the early 19th century as transformism or transmutation, preceded his extensive observational work on invertebrates. With his colleagues, French naturalists Georges Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Lamarck accepted the view that animals in nature were arranged on one continuous scala naturae (natural scale). According to Lamarck, once nature formed life, the arrangement of all subsequent forms of life was the result of time and environment interacting with the organization of organic beings. From the simplest forms of life, more complex forms emerged naturally. These ideas were initially presented in Lamarck's major theoretical work, Philosophie zoologique (Zoological Philosophy, 1809), and he elaborated on them throughout his career. His final treatment of his hypothesis was included in his multi-volume work on invertebrates.
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