Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist known for his early theories on evolution in the early 19th century. He proposed that organisms can change during their lifetimes and pass those changes to their offspring, a concept often summarized as "inheritance of acquired characteristics." For example, he suggested that a giraffe's long neck evolved because ancestors stretched to reach higher leaves, and this trait was inherited by subsequent generations. Although Lamarck's ideas were largely replaced by Darwin's theory of natural selection, his work laid important groundwork for the study of evolution and the relationship between organisms and their environments.