Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was a French naturalist who coined the term biologie in 1802 and proposed one of the first coherent theories of species transformation, arguing that organisms change over generations by adapting to their environment and passing on traits acquired through use or disuse. Though his own mechanism of inheritance was later rejected, his broader claim that species are not fixed but descend from earlier forms anticipated the fact of evolution that Darwin's natural selection would later explain by a different mechanism. He spent most of his career as a professor of invertebrate zoology at the Museum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, the field he is credited with naming and organizing, and his transformism was strongly opposed in his own lifetime by his colleague Georges Cuvier. He died in poverty and blindness.