Jake:
To get back to Lamarck, just because his notion of inherited acquisition is mistaken, does not mean he made no contributions to biological (and indeed other sciences.).
He served in the French Army against the Prussians in the Seven Year War. He was a great botanist who collected many species of flora, as well as fossils and minerals for French Museums. He was a great Taxonomist who created and studied the subphylum Invertabrata, which encompasses over 95 percent of all extant species on Earth. Lamarck was the first proponent of a coherent Theory of Evolution and was praised by Darwin for attributing the behavior of living things to Natural Law and not the Supernatural. And Lamarck was the first to use the term Biology to denote the study of living things.
Even though he stumbled, Lamarck was still a giant whose shoulders Darwin and other great scientists stood upon and reached for intellectual succor, much like Lamarck’s giraffe.
Science has no Inquisition for those who get something wrong, but instead a place of honor for all who contribute something right.
