The idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics was presented by:

Explanation

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) was a French naturalist known for his early ideas on evolution, articulated in Philosophie Zoologique (1809). He proposed that organisms adapt to their environments through the use or disuse of traits, a concept summarized as the "inheritance of acquired characteristics." For instance, he suggested that giraffes developed long necks because their ancestors stretched to reach higher leaves. Although his theories were later discredited in favor of Darwin's natural selection, Lamarck's work was significant in the history of evolutionary thought, introducing the idea that species can change over time.