1744: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck is born

On 1 August 1744, in the small village of Bazentin-le-Petit in northern France, Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, was born. Destined first for the church and then the army, he eventually found his calling in natural history. Working at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, Lamarck developed one of the first comprehensive theories of evolution, published in his 1809 book Philosophie zoologique.

Lamarck argued that species are not fixed. Organisms adapt to their environments during their lifetimes—giraffes stretching their necks to reach higher leaves, for instance—and these acquired traits can be inherited by offspring. While the inheritance of acquired characteristics was later rejected as a primary evolutionary mechanism, Lamarck’s insistence that life is dynamic and progressive helped open the door to evolutionary thinking.

That door mattered for the long prehistory of artificial intelligence. When mid-twentieth-century scientists began to imagine adaptive machines, they reached for biological analogies. Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, for example, treated control and communication in animals and machines as parallel problems of feedback and adjustment. Evolutionary computation later made the analogy explicit.

Genetic algorithms, pioneered by John Holland, usually follow Darwinian rules. Yet researchers have repeatedly tested Lamarckian twists: after an individual “learns” during its lifetime (through gradient descent, local search, or experience), the acquired improvements are written back into its genetic code. These Lamarckian and memetic algorithms often converge faster on hard optimization problems and continue to appear in modern work on neural architecture search and evolutionary reinforcement learning.

Thus a naturalist born on this day in 1744 still echoes in the design of systems that learn and adapt. Today’s AI researchers, whether they train massive neural nets or evolve populations of agents, inherit a conversation about how change is acquired and preserved—a conversation Lamarck helped begin.