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James Ussher
The traditional Judeo-Christian version of creationism was strongly reinforced by James Ussher , 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. During Ussher's lifetime, debate focused only on the details of his calculations rather than on the approach. Dr. Charles Lightfoot of Cambridge University in England had the last word. He proclaimed t -
John Ray
The concept of genus and species was actually developed in the late 1600's by John Ray, an English naturalist and ordained minister. However, it was Linnaeus who used this system to name us Homo sapiens (literally, "wise men"). He also placed us in the order Primates (a larger, more inclusive category than our genus) along with all of the apes, monkeys, and prosimians. This was very controversial at the time since it implied that people were part of nature, along with other animals and plant -
Carolus Linnaeus
The leading biological scientist of the mid 18th century was the Swedish botanist Karl von Linné (Carolus Linnaeus in Latin). 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. The goal of documenting change in nature would not have made sense to him. Late in his life, however, he was troubled by the fact th -
Immanuel Kant
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) developed a concept of descent that is relatively close to modern thinking; he did in a way anticipate Darwinian thinking. Based on similarities between organisms, Kant speculated that they may have come from a single ancestral source. In a thoroughly modern speculation, he mused that "an orang-outang or a chimpanzee may develop the organs which serve for walking, grasping objects, and speaking-in short, that lie may evolve the structure of man, w -
Comte de Buffon
Late in the 18th century, a small number of European scientists began to quietly suggest that life forms are not fixed. The wealthy French mathematician and naturalist, George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon , actually 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. In 1774, in fact, he speculated that the earth must be at least 75,000 -
Erasmus Darwin
Another late 18th century closet-evolutionist was Erasmus Darwin , the grandfather of the well known 19th century naturalist, Charles Darwin. Erasmus was an English country physician, poet, and amateur scientist. 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; -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
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 -
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. It was relatively easy for the French scientist, George Cuvier , and other critics of Lamarck to discredit his theory. If it was correct, the children of cowboys who have developed bowed legs as a result of a lifetime of riding horses would be born with bowed legs as well. That, of course, does not occur. Likewise, the children -
Charles Lyell
A careful examination of European geological deposits in the early 19th century led the English lawyer and geologist, Charles Lyell , to conclude that Cuvier's catastrophism theory was wrong. He believed that there primarily have been slower, progressive changes. In his three volume Principles of Geology (1830-1833), 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. T -
Charles Darwin
Darwin published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species.[3][4] By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public had accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favoured competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed.
