| [N]ature
has in favorable times, places, and climates multiplied her
first germs of animality, given place to developments of their
organizations, [. . .] and
increased
and diversified their organs. Then [. . ] aided by much
time and by a slow but constant diversity of circumstances, she has
gradually
brought about in this respect the state of things which we now observe.
(lecture to the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, May 1803) The quotation above sounds strikingly similar to the theory of organic evolution as it would be proposed by Charles Darwin in 1859. In fact, these are the translated words of a French botanist and natural historian of invertebrates who set forth a fully developed theory of evolution half a century before Darwin. Indeed, Darwin credited Lamarck as the first person to attribute "all changes in the organic, as well as the inorganic world" to natural laws and not to "miraculous interposition." |