The widespread popular scientific idea, current since the late 18th century, that a progressive force might occur in nature. Both Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles DARWIN 1809-82) and France’s Count George de Buffon (1707-78) favored such versions of evolution, including the idea that plant and animal species have changed during the existence of life on Earth. Its application to the progressive evolution of species was developed most fully by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) around the beginning of the 19th century. Lamarck accepted the belief that species are continually evolving from the simple to the complex within the (separate) hierarchies of plant and animal species. The main mechanism of change, discussed in his Philosophic Zoologique (1809), was that the intensive use of an organ, especially if accompanied by effort, “the will to change,” motivated organisms to acquire desirable characteristics, which would then be inherited in the more developed form. According to this theory, giraffes, stretching to reach the leaves at the tops of trees, became long necked. It is in that sense the inheritance by offspring of characteristics acquired and developed during the parents’ life-time that this version of evolution is described as “progressive.”
In the early 19th century, mainstream scientists, especially men such as Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1830) in France and Sir Charles LYELL (1797-1875) in Britain, judged the idea of evolution to be contrary to evidence. Nevertheless, some writers continued to speculate on evolution, most famously in the anonymous vestiges of the natural history of creation (1844). This work was labeled “pseudoscience” by those reviewers who defended the then-scientific orthodoxy.