Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theory

19th Century, before Charles Darwin 1) A characteristic which is used more and more by an organism becomes bigger and stronger, and one that is not used eventually disappears 2) any feature of an organism that is improved through use, is passed to its offspring EXAMPLE: Giraffes, he believed, had short necks, but by constantly stretching them, they elongated HOWEVER: It is now commonly accepted that Lamarck's ideas were wrong. For example, simple organisms are still detected in all varieties of life, plus it is now known that mutations can create variation such as neck length