Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace, And Charles Darwin

Who do you think of when a person says “evolution”? Charles Darwin probably came into your mind first, didn’t he? Surprisingly, Darwin is not the only evolutionary theorist, as there are two others with similarly different ideas. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Charles Darwin all investigated this field of science. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first to have extended theories of evolution. In 1794, Lamarck started working in the natural history museum, Jardin des Plantes, and was in charge of studying insects and worms. He saw this as an opportunity, as scientists then did not focus near as much on insects and worms. Lamarck studied them, and classified them, eventually writing a series of books explaining the different variations of invertebrates (Bowman, 2015, para. 4). Lamarck noticed how much the different
He looked very precisely at the fossil records and noticed that some species changed physical features as time went by, eventually looking different from their ancestors. Many scientists had discussed evolution, but no one had a concrete theory such as Lamarck’s. He insisted that animals underwent physical changes in their lifetime, and then passed on those physical changes to their offspring. The reason for the physical changes being that when the animals did not use a certain part of their body, it eventually evolves off them, or disappears (Bowman, 2015, para. 7). According to him, a ladder of complexity could be set in place, containing people at the top, of all species. Lamarck’s theories were