Although the name "Lamarck" is now associated with a discredited view of evolution, the French biologist's notion that organisms inherit the traits acquired during their parents' lifetime had common ...

If there is an afterlife, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck has had a roller-coaster of a ride. His life went well enough at first, defined early by honors gained on the battlefield and in the lab. Lamarck was a ...

You might recall from high school biology a scientist by the name of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He proposed a mechanism of evolution in which organisms pass on traits acquired during their lifetimes to ...

Two bacteriologists showed that mutations arise spontaneously in bacterial cultures, thereby disproving Jean-Baptiste Lamarck ...

Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories tell tales not so much of evolution, but of the magic and wonder of the animal world. He describes the wizard who gave the camel a hump for its laziness, and the ...

Les travaux du naturaliste Jean-Baptiste Lamarck révèlent l'apport essentiel de la figure de l'antithèse dans l'argumentation scientifique. Employée de manière systématique dans la méthode ...

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) formulated the first real theory of biological evolution, in which organisms acquired traits directly from adapting to the environments they faced and passed those ...

Work by Lamarck scholars over the past 20 years calls into question some of the assertions made by Dan Graur and his colleagues in their Book Review (Nature 460, 688–689; 2009). For example, far from ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover the history of science and exploration. The idea of evolution might have taken off sooner if it hadn't been for the ibis ...

I take issue with the contention that Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles, tackled evolution only in poetic terms, as implied by Dan Graur and colleagues in their insightful Book Review ('In ...

Ever wonder how in the world flamingoes grow into pink adults from white chicks? Why your grandparents buy bags of lime to grow their signature pink hydrangeas? Why are most calico cats female? Why do ...

Scientists have found that parents not only pass on traits to their offspring via their DNA but also through the molecular "wrappers" that package the DNA. The research suggests traits acquired by ...