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EXTINCTION: GEORGES CUVIER
He worked with animal fossils. The fossil evidence brought him to a statement which said that periodically the Earth experiments sudden changes and that those changes could make species disappear. -
Early Concepts of Evolution: Jean Baptiste Lamarck
He claimed that new primitive life forms sprang up throughout the history of life. -
Discrete Genes Are Inherited: Gregor Mendel
Mendel discovered what scientists later called dominant and recessive alleles. -
Natural Selection: Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace
arwin and Wallace argued and natural selection might produce new types of body parts, from wings to eyes. -
Random Mutations and Evolutionary Change: Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane, & Sewall Wright
Their approach revealed how mutations arise and if they are favored by natural selection or not and if they are able to spread through a population. -
Speciation: Ernst Mayr
He realized that the origins of species could be explained by genetics. -
DNA, the Language of Evolution: Francis Crick & James Watson
They realized that nucleic acids are arranged on a twister ladder, with two runners made of phosphates and sugars, and a series of rungs made of pairs of organic compounds nowadays known as bases. Their discovery was the double helix of the DNA. -
Evolution and Development for the 21st Century: Stephen Jay Gould
Gould predicted that heterochrony and similar evolutionary changes would not be directed by the genes that actually build various body parts. Instead of this, he proposed that the genes that regulate other genes would hold the key to the evolution of embryos.