John Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a 19th-century French biologist who proposed an early theory of evolution. He believed that organisms can develop new traits during their lifetime in response to their environment and then pass these traits to their offspring. For example, he suggested giraffes stretched their necks to reach higher leaves, and their descendants inherited longer necks. While his ideas are outdated—modern science shows genetic changes occur through DNA mutations—Lamarck was important for emphasizing the dynamic relationship between organisms and their environment in the study of evolution.