Why was charles Darwins theory of evolution accepted rather than Lamarcks?
The Imaginary Lamarck: A Look at Bogus “History” in Schoolbooks Michael T. Ghiselin Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) takes a prominent place in many biology textbooks and life-science textbooks, which depict him as the author of a “theory” of evolution based upon the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lamarck’s views, these books say, should be rejected in favor of the theory of evolution by natural selection, propounded by Charles Darwin (1809-1882), because only Darwin’s theory is compatible with the findings of 20th-century genetics. The Lamarck presented in schoolbooks, however, is a fiction — an imaginary figure who has been fashioned from hearsay and wrong guesses, and who has been replicated in countless books by successive teams of plagiarists. This figure shares very little, except his name, with the Lamarck of history. Textbook-writers have imbued the fictitious Lamarck with an importance that the real Lamarck never had, and they have credited him with ideas that t
