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Oct 23, 1581
James Ussher
This belief that the earth and life on it are only about 6000 years old fit neatly with the then prevalent theory of the "Great Chain of Being." -
John Ray
English naturalist and ordained minister. Linnaeus who used this system to name us Homo sapiens. -
Carolus Linnaeus
His 180 books are filled with precise descriptions of nature, but he did little analysis or interpretation. This is to be expected since Linnaeus apparently believed that he was just revealing the unchanging order of life created by God. -
Charles Bonnet,
Swiss naturalist and philosophical writer who discovered parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) and developed the catastrophe theory of evolution. -
James Hutton
This held that the natural forces now changing the shape of the earth's surface have been operating in the past much the same way. In other words, the present is the key to understanding the past. This revolutionary idea was instrumental in leading Charles Darwin to his understanding of biological evolution in the 1830's. However, it was not until the late 19th century that most educated people in the Western world finally rejected the theory of catastrophism in favor of uniformitarianism. -
James Cook,
British naval captain, navigator, and explorer, who explored the seaways and coasts of Canada (1759, 1763–67) and conducted three expeditions to the Pacific Ocean (1768–71; 1772–75; 1776–79), ranging from the Antarctic ice fields to the Bering Strait and from the coasts of North America to Australia and New Zealand. -
Comte de Buffon
He speculated that this was somehow a result of influences from the environment or even chance. He believed that the earth must be much older than 6000 years. In 1774, in fact, he speculated that the earth must be at least 75,000 years old. He also suggested that humans and apes are related. Buffon was careful to hide his radical views in a limited edition 44 volume natural history book series called Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804). By doing this, he avoided broad public criticism. -
Jean-Baptiste Chevalier de Lamarck
The first evolutionist who confidently and very publicly stated his ideas about the processes leading to biological change was a French protégé of the Comte de Buffon. -
Lazzaro Spallanzani
Italian physiologist who made important contributions to the experimental study of bodily functions and animal reproduction. His investigations into the development of microscopic life in nutrient culture solutions paved the way for the research of Louis Pasteur. -
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek
studies such forms are living organisms. In a series of experiments he showed that gravy, when boiled, did not produce these forms if placed in phials that were immediately sealed by fusing the glass. As a result of this work, he concluded that the objects in pond water and other preparations were living organisms introduced from the air and that Buffon’s views were without foundation. -
Georges Buffon and John Turberville Needham
Spallanzani first biological work, published in 1767, was an attack on the biological theory suggested by Georges Buffon and John Turberville Needham, who believed that all living things contain, in addition to inanimate matter, special “vital atoms” that are responsible for all physiological activities. They postulated that, after death, the “vital atoms” escape into the soil and are again taken up by plants. -
Erasmus Darwin
He believed that evolution has occurred in living things, including humans, but he only had rather fuzzy ideas about what might be responsible for this change. He wrote of his ideas about evolution in poems and a relatively obscure two volume scientific publication entitled Zoonomia; or, the Laws of Organic Life (1794-1796). In this latter work, he also suggested that the earth and life on it must have been evolving for "millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind." -
Charles Lyell
A careful examination of European geological deposits in the early 19th century led the English lawyer and geologist, Charles Lyell click this icon to hear the name pronounced, to conclude that Cuvier's catastrophism theory was wrong. He believed that there primarily have been slower, progressive changes. Lyell provided conclusive evidence for the theory of uniformitarianism -
Francesco Redi
was one of the first to question the spontaneous origin of living things. Having observed the development of maggots and flies on decaying meat, Redi in 1668 devised a number of experiments, all pointing to the same conclusion: if flies are excluded from rotten meat, maggots do not develop. On meat exposed to air, however, eggs laid by flies develop into maggots. But renewed support for spontaneous generation came from the publication in 1745 of a book, An Account of Some New Microscopical Disco -
Louis Pasteur
By the 18th century it had become obvious that higher organisms could not be produced by nonliving material. The origin of microorganisms such as bacteria, however, was not fully determined until Louis Pasteur proved in the 19th century that microorganisms reproduce -
Louis Agassiz,
Pre-Darwinian science was full of external teleology in keeping with its central purpose: to illuminate God's plan through the study of nature. Things are as they are because that's what God wanted them to be. Louis Agassiz, an eminent naturalist, founder of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard and an implacable opponent of Darwinian evolution, wrote -
George Cuvier
Lamarck did not invent the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics but stated it clearly and publicly in an 1809 publication entitled Philosophie Zoologique -
John Tyndall
professor of natural philosophy at the Royal Institution, London. There he became a friend of the much-admired physicist and chemist Michael Faraday, entertained and instructed fashionable audiences with brilliant lecture demonstrations (rivaling the biologist T.H. Huxley in his popular reputation), and pursued his research. An outstanding experimenter, particularly in atmospheric physics, Tyndall examined the transmission of both radiant heat and light through various gases and vapours. He disc -
Aleksandr Oparin
Russian biochemist noted for his studies on the origin of life from chemical matter. By drawing on the insights of chemistry, he extended the Darwinian theory of evolution backward in time to explain how simple organic and inorganic materials might have combined into complex organic compounds and how the latter might have formed the primordial organism. -
Paul D. Boyer,
merican biochemist who, with John E. Walker, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1997 for their explanation of the enzymatic process involved in the production of the energy-storage molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which fuels the metabolic processes of the cells of all living things. (Danish chemist Jens C. Skou also shared the award for separate research on the molecule.) -
John E. Walker
After receiving his doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1969, Walker undertook research projects at universities in the United States and Paris. His award-winning work was conducted at the University of Cambridge in the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, which he joined in 1974, becoming senior scientist in 1982.
