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Question of Natural World
Nicholas Steno realized that other geological processes could create apparent exceptions to his laws of superposition and horizontality. -
Historie Naturelle
Georges Louis Buffon, an author, wrote the Historie Naturelle. It includes all the knowledge available in his time on the "natural sciences", a broad term that includes disciplines which today would be called material science, physics, chemistry, and technology. Buffon notes the similarities between men and apes, although he considered apes completely devoid of the ability to think, differentiating them sharply from human beings. -
An Essay on the Principle of Population
Thomas Malthus, an English economist, came up with his theory that population growth will always tend to outrun the food supply and that betterment of humankind is impossible without stern limits on reproduction. -
Philosophie Zoologique
Jean Baptiste Lamarck wrote Philosophie Zoologique, in which he described a mechanism by which change was gradually introduced into the species and passed down through generations. His theory is referred to as the theory of transformation. -
Cuvier's Essay on the Theory of the Earth
Georges Cuvier proposed that now-extinct species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic flooding events. This is modernly known as the theory of catastrophism. -
Uniformitarianism
Sir Charles Lyell proposed the theory of Uniformitarianism, which is an indefinitely long age for the earth, despite geological evidence suggesting an old but definite age. -
The Father of Genetics
Gregor Mendel, a German botanist, and scientist discovered the fundamental laws of inheritance. He deduced that genes come in pairs and are inherited as distinct units, one from each parent. -
Theory of Evolution
Charles Darwin and Russel Wallace created the Theory of Evolution, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce. -
Thomas Hunt Morgan, Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane Discoveries
Many scientists today have used the mathematical tools developed by Fisher, Wright, and Haldane to measure the evolutionary change in the wild with precision. Their insights have even allowed researchers to depiculate the puzzle of some hereditary diseases. -
Punctuated Equilibrium
Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould proposed that gradualism, commonly attributed to Charles Darwin, is basically nonexistent in the fossil record and that stasis dominates the history of most fossil species.