ABSTRACT
Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was the first major proponent of the idea of evolution at the species level. His most important work for the present purpose was his treatise on Zoological Philosophy, which was first published in France in 1809 and translated into English in 1914 (reissued in 1984). It was in that book that Lamarck laid out his ideas and his arguments for the highly controversial notion that species are mutable. That is, Lamarck held that species can evolve and are not permanently fixed, as most naturalists of the time believed they were. It is a terrible irony that Lamarck’s name is irrevocably connected with the concept of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, whereas his truly original conception was the idea of organic evolution at the species level. For Lamarck the concept of evolution was the way to understand the eventual emergence of higher psychological functions such as attention, thinking, memory, judgment, imagination, and reasoning. As Richard W.Burkhardt, Jr. (1977), one of Lamarck’s biographers, has made clear, Lamarck was above all a systematic thinker ever on the alert for the large facts: “the great truths, which the philosophers could not discover because they had not sufficiently observed nature, and which the zoologists have not perceived because they have occupied themselves too much with matters of detail” (Lamarck, 1809/1984).
