Much maligned Lamarck was one of the greats
His full name, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (1 August 1744 – 18 December 1829), is not familiar to most people, they, those hoards of biology 101 students, just know him as Lamarck. Lamarck is best known to biology students as the guy who screwed up the mechanism for evolution in 1809. The use or disuse model, with the inheritance of aquired characters. A few points on this: First, this is how science is supposed to proceed. Ideas get proposed, and over time get solidified or thrown out. As Francis Crick stated, most hypothesis are wrong. However, if they were not proposed than the wrongness would not have been determined. As Neil deGrasse Tyson has said, The scientific method is doing its best to be wrong—until it's not . Lamarck did understand that organisms changed over time, that is that evolution occurred, long before most of his contempararies. We should remember Lamarck for his accomplishments, including his attempt at the ...