Jean-Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monet de Lamarck was born in Picardy, France, on August 1, 1744. He received a Jesuit education at Amiens and briefly pursued a military career before turning to science. Lamarck's interests ranged widely from natural history to meteorology, and with the reorganization of the Jardin du Roi into the Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in 1793, he was appointed to the professorship of invertebrates. Lamarck's central concern, reflecting his Enlightenment values, was to present a thoroughly naturalistic and developmental account of all aspects of the natural world. His developmental geology followed uniformitarian principles, and his deism rendered irrelevant the optimism of natural theology and dissolved the distinction between humans and other animals. Lamarck believed that "life" is a force imposed on the universe by the creator, but he rejected any idea of a plan for the development of species. His early...