-
100
Anaximander of Miletus
(610–546 BC) Anaximander of Miletus proposed that the first animals lived in water, during a wet phase of the Earth's past, and that the first land-dwelling ancestors of mankind must have been born in water, and only spent part of their life on land ,man needs prolonged nursing to live. -
100
Aristotle
(384–322 BC)His writings on biology resulted from his research in to natural history on & around the isle of Lesbos, & have survived in the type of books, usually known by their Latin names, De anima (on the essence of life), Historia animalium (inquiries about animals), De generatione animalium (reproduction), & De partibus animalium (anatomy). -
100
Titus Lucretius Carus
Titus Lucretius Carus (d. 50 BC), the Roman philosopher & atomist, wrote the poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), which provides the best surviving explanation of the ideas of the Greek Epicurean philosophers. It describes the development of the cosmos, the Earth, living things, & human society through purely naturalistic mechanisms, without any reference to supernatural involvement -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution. -
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
He maintained that, since nature takes no sudden leaps, even organs which are superfluous in any given species, if they have played an important part in other species of the same family, are retained as rudiments, which testify to the permanence of the general plan of creation. -
Robert Chambers
In 1844, the Scottish publisher Robert Chambers anonymously published an extremely controversial but widely read book entitled Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. This book proposed an evolutionary scenario for the origins of the Solar System and life on Earth. It claimed that the fossil record showed a progressive ascent of animals with current animals being branches off a main line that leads progressively to humanity. It implied that the transmutations lead to the unfolding of a preo -
Charles Darwin
He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. -
George Gaylord Simpson
Tempo and Mode in Evolution (1944) was George Gaylord Simpson's seminal contribution to the evolutionary synthesis, which integrated the facts of paleontology with those of genetics and natural selection.Most evolution—"nine-tenths"—occurs by the steady phyletic transformation of whole lineages (anagenesis). In contrast to Ernst Mayr's interpretation of speciation by splitting, particularly allopatric and peripatric speciation -
DAPHNE J. FAIRBAIRN
Dr. Fairbairn is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging expertise in quantitative genetics, migration, and natural selection. Her work shows the importance of selection arising from lack of genetic variation (low heritability) and genetic correlations for size among body components and between sexes. -
Al-Jahiz
The first Muslim biologist and philosopher to publish detailed speculations about natural history, the Afro-Arab writer al-Jahiz, wrote in the 9th century. In the Book of Animals, he considered the effects of the environment on an animal's chances for survival, and described the struggle for existence. Al-Jahiz also wrote descriptions of food chains. Al-Jahiz speculated on the influence of the environment on animals and considered the effects of the environment on the likelihood of an an
