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384 BCE
aristoteles
He suggested that the origin of life was spontaneous generation, in which new members of the species emerged from inanimate matter as other unrelated forms of life. -
francisco redi
In 1668 he contradicted spontaneous generation by keeping flies out of the flesh without contamination, thus preventing the appearance of larvae and later flies. -
buffon
He made an encyclopedic project entitled "Natural History", with the aim of synthesizing in a single work all the positive knowledge about the natural world of his time. Buffon's works present a planet whose fluctuations do not show a particular planet, establishing the assumptions that will eventually lead to an evolutionary interpretation of natural history, such as the ideas about the great age of the Earth and about the lamutability of species. -
creation of the binomial nomenclature
The need to give names to all the known species and to the many that are being discovered led Carlos Linneo to group them by their improvements, with which a family tree was also born, which would later be completed at the bottom with the fossil species. Inevitably, the concept of evolution of the species appears, even if Linnaeus was a fixist. -
Jean Baptiste de Lamarck
It enunciated for the first time in history a theory of biological evolution. Explained in his book Zoological Philosophy (1809), the Lamarckian theory postulates that evolution is a consequence of the adaptation of living beings to natural surroundings. According to Lamarck, it is the will of the living being that is responsible for evolutionary change, since the individual adapts to the environmental changes that take place. -
Evolution and degeneration.
The big problem of the time is that, if science talks about "extinct species", the work of the Creator is not perfect, since some have not worked. Georges Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon, accepts evolutionary changes, but in the opposite direction. Monkeys are degenerations of man, the donkey of the horse, etc. -
Publication of "Las especies de las plantas" Carlos Linneo.
Work that started the modern nomenclature in biology. -
georges curvier
He presented a work in which for the first time he effectively demonstrated the existence of extinct species of proboscis, the group to which elephants belong. The principle of the correlation of the organs. The modification of a piece would imply the modification of the whole organism) is the most significant contribution to the science of his time and is also the logical argument that prevented him from accepting the mutability of the species proposed by Lamarck. -
First formulation of the theory of biological evolution
It recognizes the change in the species and explains it through two forces which, combined, are the causes of the evolutionary tree: on the one hand, the tendency of nature to increase complexity; on the other hand, the accommodation of organisms to the external environment and the inheritance of such adaptations to their descendants. Although he still defended the theory of spontaneous generation. Currently his evolutionary theory has been displaced, -
Paleontology and evolution
The study of fossils (Paleontology), is based on them and current beings, which groups them by their structural characteristics (dentition, shape, etc.) and thus creates the comparative anatomy. But its conclusions fall into the fixism, and it proposes the theory of the great catastrophes for the extinction of the species avoiding again to put in question the work of the Creator. -
charles darwin
He proposed that the small variations found within natural populations would be progressively favoured by the natural selection of those individuals that managed to survive and pass on these characteristics to their offspring. Since resources are always limited, those characteristics that in a given environment favour the survival of the most suitable will have to be propagated and accentuated within the species. -
herbert spencer
He coined the famous slogan "survival of the fittest" to refer to the mechanism of natural selection. -
gregor mendel
Father of genetics. He designed a series of experiments with crosses, in order to mathematically limit the problem of inheritance. He made the results of his experiments with public peas in 1865 but they didn't have much impact at that time. -
louis pasteur
He disproved the idea of spontaneous generation by proving once again that microorganisms did not grow in covered sterile broth. -
Alfred Russel Wallace
He reached conclusions very similar to those of Darwin regarding the origin of new races and species through a mechanism very similar to natural selection (although Wallace did not use that term). He sent an essay to Darwin with his conclusions, and a year later "The Origin of Species" came out. -
Thomas Huxley
He is among the first to propose a "dinosaur" origin for birds, a hypothesis that is now fully confirmed. He first approached the ape origin of human beings, based on different fossils found. -
The journey begins on the Beagle.
Darwin took scrupulous notes throughout the journey, and regularly sent his findings to Cambridge. -
Principles of geology. Theory of dynamic equilibrium.
It represents the gradualist current, contrary to fixism, and explains the geological and biological changes through successive periods of extinction and creation. His work Principles of Geology inspired Charles Darwin. -
august weissman
It contributed to purifying and redefining Darwinism, giving rise to neo-Darwinism. It removed the Lamarckian remains, as the inheritance of acquired characters. He dismantled Darwin's theory of inheritance, pangenesis, by presenting his own theory of germplasm. He correctly identified chromosomes as the cellular material in which hereditary factors were located. -
Ernst Haeckel
An ally of Darwinism, he devoted several works to defending the theory of evolution and his views on it. In 1866 he published the first metaphor of the tree of evolution. In 1874 he wrote one of the first works in which he applied the theory of evolution to the origin of mankind. -
hugo de vries
He carried out botanical studies, where he concluded that, contrary to Darwin's statement, the new species did not gradually evolve from the previous ones, but rather originated abruptly, appearing already perfectly formed from the previous one, due to "mutations". He rediscovered Mendel's work when he was working on similar experiments in 1900. He remained true to his theory of the origin of species by macromutation. -
Publication of the book "The Origin of Species"
In the book, Darwin makes an "extensive argument" from detailed observations and inferences, and considers in advance the objections to his theory. This book was created both by the contributions of the data collected by Darwin and the data obtained by Wallace. -
oparin
Together with Haldane he simulated prebiotic evolution in the laboratory in 1924. -
George Gaylord Simpson
He incorporated paleontological science into the current of thought that led to the formulation of the synthetic theory of evolution. It distinguishes three levels of evolution (megaevolution, macroevolution and microevolution). His theories were later discarded, but his work is the most influential contribution that a paleontologist has ever made. -
Ernst Mayr
Together with Dobzhansky, Huxley, Simpson and Stebbins, he laid the foundations of the modern synthetic theory of evolution. He proposed that natural selection acts as a standardizing mechanism that cannot explain the origin of genetic discontinuities, which can only be explained by external random factors, such as the appearance of geographical barriers that cause isolation of two populations. -
James Watson
Together with Francis Crick and with the contributions of Rosalind Franklin, they demonstrated the structure of the genetic molecule, DNA. -
Endosymbiotic theory.
It was formulated by Lynn Margulis, and describes the passage from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells by means of symbiotic additions. It also states that independent life tends to come together and create more complex levels of organization. -
Theory of punctuated equilibrium.
The theory of punctuated equilibrium understands the evolutionary process as abrupt and rapid changes that punctually break very long periods of evolutionary immobility. This theory was developed by the scientists Gould and Eldredge.
