Lamark believed that it was individuals that evolved through evolution in one lifetime and could pass these gained traits on, where Darwin believed that a population evolved due to mutations and natural selection.

Essentially, Lamarck proposed that evolution was due to the desire to have certain traits. Darwin proposed that, on average, the more survivable traits survived.

So that is what has been going on. Normally evolution happens slowly over many many generations. In recent years I have been hearing people talking about "evolving" in terms of deciding to do so in one's own lifetime. The new agers really go to town with this. They expect to become super people in just a few short years. There is talk about chaos and violence in our world and how the worthy and tough will survive and the unworthy and weak will perish. The world will start anew with some supermen. I have been hearing this from people all over the place. 30 years ago this would be considered really weird, but I hear this in different versions from practically every other person now. What is going on? Who was Lamarck?

Outside of biology or simulated biology, evolution usually just means change or motion over time.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evolution

In the 1600's, Spallanzini demonstrated that fully formed mice and flies do not arise spontaneously from inanimate matter.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first published his views on the mechanism of biological evolution in 1801. This was expanded in the publications in 1809 and 1815. This evolutionary theory known today as Lamarckism (or Lysenkoism).

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Philosophie Zoologique ou Exposition des Considérations Relatives à l'Histoire Naturelle des Animaux (Zoological Philosophy: Exposition with Regard to the Natural History of Animals), (1809)

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Historie Naturelle des Animaux sans Vertèbres (Natural History of Invertebrate Animals), (1815).

Lamarck suggested that there should be many separate trees of life, and plants and animals should not be in the same tree. Darwin thought it likely there was just one tree of common descent. In the Modern Synthesis, we know bacteria can share genetic information between species and retroviruses can insert themselves into eukaryotic DNA, but bacteria, plants and animals are all in a common "tree" even if the tree is a little more complicated then the ever-branching, never-recombining tree that Darwin envisioned. The origin of a virus are harder to determine since they don't have fossils or a lot of homology with non-viruses. So for the life Darwin knew about, the modern biologist has largely supported Darwin over Lamarck in that there is on big tree of common descent, but there may be separate trees for some viruses.

"Lamarck accepted the then widely-held view of the possibility of the spontaneous generation of new living forms from inanimate matter, which was later disproven [for modern bacteria] by Pasteur in the late nineteenth century." Darwin considered the origins of life to be outside his theory. In the Modern Synthesis, evolution would predate cells to some time when DNA or RNA was self-replicating competitively, but the origins of the first replicator are still a matter of hypothesis and testing. Here, Lamarck's views are incompatible with observation.

"Lamarck held that there were two causes of evolutionary change: a drive towards perfection, and a capacity of organisms to react to the environment and adapt to the needs of the present situation." So for Lamarck, the environment causes evolution. Darwin held that natural selection would operated on the variation which exists in a population. So the environment is a filter on natural variation. In the Soviet Union, Lysenko demonstrated that Lamarck's concept of a drive towards perfection was more politically acceptable than the messy business of Darwin's materialist struggle to reproduce. For decades, Soviet agriculture and working biologists were held hostage to Lysenko's placing politics over science. The experiment failed -- millions died. Natural Selection is one of the most important pillars of the Modern Synthesis.

Lamarck and Darwin both believed that organs were strengthened through use, and weakened through disuse in a heritable manner. In this theory, called soft inheritance, use and disuse of an organ would be signaled to the gonads for offspring to inherit. The late 19th century was when the rules of heredity were established by Mendel and Weismann, and put in mathematical form by Fisher in the early 20th century. The mathematical development combined with the understanding of what DNA is and how it functions made random genetic drift a new addition to the theory. While DNA-based genetics is king in the Modern Synthesis, a new science of epigenetics is looking at a new form of communication between parents and the development of their offspring. Nothing like Lamarck and Darwin's use-it-or-lose-it-in-one-generation remains. Yet over thousands of generations, metabolically expensive organ systems like eyes can be lost when they convey no benefits, like in a dark cave. This is just natural selection refusing to preserve systems which are a waste -- any mutation which tends to reduce the metabolic cost of the eyes (like making them smaller or causing them to not develop) would be selected for.

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/precursors/precurstrans.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/darwinism.html
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/genetic-drift.html
http://www.overpopulation.com/faq/famine/c...e-of-1958-1961/

Thank you for explaining that. Lamarck was from a long time ago. Some people just re dug him up it seems. The oldies just keep coming back.