Final answer:
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck first recognized environmental impact on evolution and coined 'adaptation'. His inheritance of acquired characteristics hypothesis, though disproven, influenced evolutionary thought.
Step-by-step explanation:
The French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck was the first to recognize the role of the environment in evolutionary change and to coin the term adaptation. Lamarck proposed that organisms could adapt to their environment through the process known as the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Although his ideas were later discredited, Lamarck's work laid the groundwork for future evolutionary theories, including Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection.