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Period: Jan 19, 1000 to
Pre-darwin
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John Ray Suggests Primates Are Our Relatives
In the late 1680's, John Ray developed the idea that humans are closely related to primates and that we are part of the natural world. -
Carolus Linnaeus Birth
Carolus Linnaeus, or Carl Linné considered the father of modern taxonomy for his work in hierarchical classification he believed in the fixed nature of species as Darwin. He was born on 1703 May 23 Carl Linneaeus was born in smaland. -
Comte de Buffon
French zoologist also known as George Louis Leclerc, actually said that living things do change through time and that Earth must be much older than 6,000 years. -
Carolus Linnaeus, or Carl Linné (1707-1778)
Carolus Linnaeus is considered the father of modern taxonomy for his work in hierarchical classification of various organisms. -
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Immanuel Kant came up with the Concept of Descent, which is alot like modern thinking. He thought that all living things may come from a single ancestral source. -
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
In his book, "Systeme de la Nature' theorized on the nature of heredity and how new species come into being. He thought that speciation took place by chance events in nature, rather than by spontaneous generation as was believed at the time. Has another book, "Essai de Cosmologie". -
Charles Bonnet
Charles Bonnet, a Swiss naturalist, first used embryological development towards the development of species. -
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was also a distinguished naturalist with his own intriguing ideas about evolution. While he never thought of natural selection, he did argue that all life could a have a single common ancestor, though he struggled with the concepts of a mechanism for this descent. Like Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin subscribed to a theory stating that the use or disuse of parts could in itself make them grow or shrink, and that unconscious striving by the organism -
George Cuvier
Due to weakness of Lamarck's theory it was relatively easy for the French scientists and others to discredit the idea of inheritanceof acquired characteristics. First scientist to documentthe extinction of ancient animals and was an internationally recgonized expert on dinosaurs. -
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Geoffroy believed in the underlying unity of organismal design and the possibility of the tranmutation of species throughout time and history. -
Sir William Lawrence
He had published two books of his lectures which contained pre-Darwinian ideas on man's nature and, effectively, on evolution. He was forced to withdraw them because they were rules "blasphemous" to other beliefs. -
Hutton Introduces Uniformitarianism
James Hutton presented two papers discussing uniformitarianism which is saying that "the present is the key to the past." -
Boucher de Perthes
His hobby was collecting ancient stone tools from deep down in the Somme River gravel deposits. Since he found these artifacts in association with the bones of extinct animals, he concluded that they must have been made at the time that those animals lived. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's (1744-1829) theory of evolution was a good try for his time, but has now been discredited by experimental evidence and the much more plausible mechanism of modification proposed by Darwin. Lamarck saw species as not being fixed and immutable, but rather in a constantly changing state. He presented a multitude of different theories that he believed combined to explain descent with modification of these changing species. -
Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus' (1766-1834) theory of population growth was in the end what inspired Darwin to develop the theory of natural selection. According to Malthus, populations produce many more offspring than can possibly survive on the limited resources generally available. According to Malthus, poverty, famine, and disease were natural outcomes that resulted from overpopulation. However, Malthus believed that divine forces were ultimately responsible for such outcomes, which, though natural, were de -
Alfred Wallace
He is best known for independently proposing a theory of evolution due to natural selection that prompted Darwin to publish his own theory. He won awards including the Royal Society's Royal Medal(1868) and Copley Medal and Order of Merit (1908). -
Lyell Provides a Backbone for Hutton's Theory
Charles Lyell, from Scotland, published three volumes of "Principles of Geology" which provided solid information to James Hutton's theory of uniformitarianism. It said that the natural forces that changed the earth in the past are the same forces that change the earth today.
