-
NICOLAS STENO
Steno established another more general principle which reads as follows: When a solid body is surrounded on all sides by another solid body, of the two bodies ultimately determined to be one by mutual contact, the surface of one expresses the properties of the surface of the other -
Period: to
GEORGES LOUIS LECLERC
According to Georges-Louis Leclerc, a certain number of different types of life are generated near a central point. He suggested that species then underwent changes as they migrated, affected by their new environments. In a way, Leclerc proposed a kind of proto-evolutionary hypothesis almost 100 years before Darwin. -
JAMES HUTTON
Hutton thought that the Earth had been shaped, not by sudden and violent events, but by slow and gradual processes: wind, weather, and the flow of water, the same processes that can be seen at work in the world today. This theory of Hutton's became known as "uniformitarianism". -
ERASMUS DARWIN
Erasmus Darwin discusses the descent of life from a common ancestor, sexual selection, the analogy of artificial selection as a means of understanding descent with modification, and a basic concept of what we now call homology. -
JEAN BAPTISTE LAMARCK
The simplest forms of plant and animal life were the result of spontaneous generation. Life successively diversified, he claimed, as a result of two very different kinds of causes. He called the former "the power of life," or the "cause which tends to make the organization more and more complex," while he classified the latter as the modifying influence of particular circumstances (i.e., the effects of the environment). -
GEORGES CUVIER
Cuvier developed his theory of catastrophes. Consequently, the fossils show that animal and plant species are destroyed again and again by floods and other natural cataclysms and that new species evolve only after that.
He was the first to show that the different rock strata in the Paris Basin each had their own mammalian fauna. Furthermore, he showed that the lower a stratum, the more different its fossil animals were from species living today. -
LOUIS AGASSIZ
The idea of continental glaciation came from Louis Agassiz in 1840. Agassiz's hypothesis says that much of the North American continent was covered by 2-mile-thick glacial ice, and that it extended across much of the Midwest. -
CHARLES LYELL
Lyell argued that the formation of the Earth's crust took place through innumerable small changes that occurred over vast periods of time, all in accordance with known natural laws. His "uniformist" proposition was that the forces shaping the planet today have operated continuously throughout its history. -
CHARLES DARWIN
Biological evolution was developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and others, which states that all species of organisms arise and develop through natural selection from small inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. -
NEODARWINISM
Neo-Darwinism is the modern version of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, incorporates the Mendelian laws of genetics, and emphasizes the role of natural selection as the primary force of evolutionary change.
