Several historians have argued that Lamarck's name is linked somewhat unfairly to the theory that has come to bear his name, and that Lamarck deserves credit for being an influential early proponent of the concept of biological evolution,farmore than for the mechanism of evolution, in which he simply followed the accepted wisdom of his time. Lamarck died 30 years before the first publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species. According to Stephen Jay Gould, if Lamarck had been aware of Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection, there is no reason to assume he would not have accepted it as a more likely alternative to his own mechanism. Note also that Darwin, like Lamarck, lacked a plausible alternative mechanismof inheritance - the particulate nature of inheritance was only observed by Gregor Mendel somewhat later, and published in 1866. Its fullsignificance was not appreciated until the Modern evolutionary synthesis in the early 1920s. An important point in its favour at the time was that Lamarck's theory contained a mechanism describing how variation is maintained,
which Darwin’s own theory lacked.
