Lamarck, Jean Baptiste (Pierre Antoine) (1744-1829)
French naturalist and pre-Darwinian evolutionist. He served in the French army, developed an interest in botany, and became keeper of the royal garden (1774) and, later, Professor of Invertebrate Zoology at the Museum of Natural History, Paris (1793). In his Philosophie zoologique (1809), he proposed that the environment causes organisms to acquire small changes which are then passed on to their descendants.