1809: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique is published [83]

Art Piece: Giraffes, John Bernard Flannagan, 20th Century [90]

Paper: Lamarckism and epigenetic inheritance: a clarification [111]

Lamarck’s ideas were very popular in his day, and many still may believe in his ideas either partially or wholly even today. Indeed, Lamarck’s ideas were a large paradigm shift in how many viewed changes in organisms over time. Most notably, Lamarck proposed that acquired characteristics are inheritable, like the neck of a giraffe. The classical Lamarckian example is that of a giraffe’s elongated neck — according [125] to Lamarckian thought, the giraffe acquired its long neck due to its ancestors stretching theirs to access and eat leaves which were out of reach at the tops of trees. Lamarck’s ideas are often disputed [105] by Darwinian ideas of evolution and natural selection, which state that specific traits and characteristics are integrated into populations gradually over time due to different selection pressures selecting for certain advantageous traits. Rather than having characteristics based on only what traits your ancestors may have had as per Lamarckian thought, Darwinism rather aimed to put natural selection at the heart of evolution. Many held Lamarck’s ideas in high esteem, with Lamarckian thought being a large way to explain changes in organisms prior to Darwin’s magnum opus. The artwork above, of Giraffes [90], is extremely relevant to Lamarck’s ideas, since the example of giraffes’ necks and acquired characteristics being a classical example. Moreover, the scientific paper also adds some more modern day scientific context surrounding Lamarck’s ideas. Notably, the paper discusses epigenetics, which [24] is “the study of how your behaviors and environment can cause changes that affect the way your genes work.” For some, this can seem similar to Lamarckian thought, however [111], “epigenetic mechanisms are not able to drive adaptive evolution by themselves,” which significantly distinguishes epigenetics from Lamarck’s ideas. At any rate, Lamarck’s ideas were incredibly influential to many thinkers pre and post-Darwin.