Happy 280th birthday to Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Yesterday, the 1st of August, was the 280th anniversary of the birth of Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, who was the Chevalier de Lamarck. As I have noted each year here, he was, as far as I am concerned, the first evolutionary biologist. He had a (wrong) mechanism that would explain adaptation, and was the major pioneer in drawing evolutionary trees. He was also a pioneer of invertebrate biology. (Although he made use of inheritance of acquired characters in his mechanisms, he did not invent that idea, as most folks already believed that).

This time I want to note the way Lamarck is commemorated in the name of a street in Paris, the Rue de Lamarck. His name is also on streets in some other French cities. The explanation that I have heard of why that particular street was named after him is that it was being built about the time that Darwin was becoming famous, and the French found a then-almost-forgotten French biologist to commemorate, to compete with Darwin. So they named a street for him in an area where new streets were being built and named. I don’t know whether this is really an accurate explanation.

The Rue de Lamarck is famous in Paris today as it gives its name to a major Metro stop, Lamarck-Coulaincourt. Above you will see the very dramatic entrance to that Metro station, photographed from the Rue de Lamarck. The entrance is between two stairways.

Happy 280th, Jean-Baptiste!

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