Week 5 Chapter Questions (1)
docx
keyboard_arrow_up
School
Ashford University *
*We aren’t endorsed by this school
Course
201
Subject
History
Date
Nov 24, 2024
Type
docx
Pages
1
Uploaded by slbnclb2010
Week 5 Chapter Questions
Part IV: Reading Life
Chapter 19: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1809)
1.
Lamarck is known for coining the term “biology” and for defining life for the first time. Explain his criteria.
Lamarck defined life for the first time into two categories living and not living. Everything on earth was either organic or inorganic, alive or dead. He stated that is definition of living was a living body , organized in parts and deem to suffer death. All living things have movement that originates from within. They also respond to outside stimuli by changing and shifting. and, perhaps most of all, they die.
2.
Describe his three principles of change.
The first, the “principle of use and disuse,” incorporated decay and death into the forward progress of life itself. Second, these alterations happen over great periods of time and are brought about by no agency apart from nature itself. Third was all of this change has a particular direction from the simple to the complex, from lesser to greater, from primitive to
the most advanced.
3.
What was the great weakness of Lamarck’s proposal?
The great weakness of the proposal was its missing mechanism. He couldn’t explain how changes get passed along from generation to generation. So he was forced to rely on vague Platonic language about nature’s “will” to produce transformations.
4. Lamarck did not live to see his theories accepted. Fifty years after his death, Ernst Haeckel summed up his contributions to science. Describe this in your own words.
As Haekel stated, “To him will always belong the immortal glory,” Haeckel concluded, “of having for the first time worked out the theory of descent, as an independent scientific theory of the first order, and as the philosophical foundation of the whole science of biology.” This means that
Lamarck was intelligent far beyond his time. His ideas and theories dismissed because of not being able to provide physical evidence, yet his ideas and theories are the backbone of biology to this day. Bauer, S. W. (2015). The Story of Western Science: From the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang
Theory. W. W. Norton. https://ccis.vitalsource.com/books/9780393243277
Discover more documents: Sign up today!
Unlock a world of knowledge! Explore tailored content for a richer learning experience. Here's what you'll get:
- Access to all documents
- Unlimited textbook solutions
- 24/7 expert homework help