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Jan 18, 1422
Aristotle
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, studied marine animals and developed an epigenetic model of evolution. He also developed a classification system for all animals.
350BC!!!! -
Jan 18, 1492
Xenophanes
Xenophanes studied fossils and put forth various theories on the evolution of life.
500BC!!!! -
Jan 18, 1500
Anaximander
He was a Greek philosipher. He introduced an idea of evolution, stating that life started as slime in the oceans and eventually moved to drier places. He also brought up the idea that species evolved over time. 520 BC!!! -
Jan 18, 1581
Judeo-Christian aka James Ussher
He was a 17th century Anglican archbishop of Armagh in Northern Ireland.By counting the generations of the Bible and adding them to modern history, he fixed the date of creation at October 23, 4004 B.C. -
John Ray
He was an English naturalist and ordained minister. He developed the concept of genus and species. However, this was very controversial at the time since it implied that people were part of nature, along with other animals and plants. -
Philosophers
Ancient philosophers believed that Nature randomly produces a huge variety of creatures. -
Catastrophism
This term was expressed by some during this era. Catastrophism- Relies upon sudden, devastating and dramatic changes (floods, volcanic eruptions, etc) to account for geologic formations. Those catastrophes no longer seemed to be occurring. -
Carolus Linnaeus
He was the leading biological scientist of the mid 18th century, and was a Swedish botanist. 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. -
Comte de Buffon
Comte de Buffon was french mathematician and naturalist. He said that living things do change through time. 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. -
Immanuel Kant
He argues that the human understanding is the source of the general laws of nature that structure all our experience; and that human reason gives itself the moral law, which is our basis for belief in God, freedom, and immortality. -
James Hutton
Hutton was a Scottish geologist. He believed 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. -
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin was the grandfather of the well known 19th century naturalist, Charles 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. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
He did not invent the idea of inheritance of acquired characteristics but stated it clearly and publicly in an 1809 publication entitled Philosophie Zoologique. -
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
He thought that speciation took place by chance events in nature, rather than by spontaneous generation as was believed at the time. -
George Cuvier
Cuvier did not reject the idea that there had been earlier life forms. In fact, he was the first scientist to document extinctions of ancient animals and was an internationally respected expert on dinosaurs. -
Charles Bonnet
He believed that natural catastrophes sparked evolutionary changes in organisms. His idea of evolution was analogous to organisms climbing a ladder of life, with animals becoming intelligent, primates becoming human, and humans becoming angels. -
Charles Lyell
Lyell was an English lawyer and geologist. He believed that there primarily have been slower, progressive changes. Lyell documented the fact that the earth must be very old and that it has been subject to the same sort of natural processes in the past that operate today in shaping the land. -
Uniformitarianism
The idea that geological processes have remained uniform over time and that slight changes over long periods can have large-scale consequences; proposed by James Hutton in 1795 and reÞned by Charles Lyell during the 1800s. The principle on which modern geology was founded: processes operating today on the earth operated in much the same way in the geologic past. Sometimes expressed as "the present is the key to the past -
Malthusian Theory
Limiting factors in nature, such as food resoures staying constant in nature or grow aritmetically. -
Michael Denton
He wrote a book about cosmological evolution, but it also implies biological evolution.
