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John Ray
Ray published voluminous works on vascular plants, vertebrates and insects, working towards the establishment of a natural classification and laying the ground rules that were to be extended to such great effect by Carolus Linnaeus some decades later. -
Francesco Redi
He proved that no maggots appeared in meat when flies were prevented from laying eggs. -
Erasmus Darwin
The grandfather of the well known 19th century naturalist, Charles Darwin. He believed that evolution has occurred in living things, including humans, but he only had rather fuzzy ideas about what might be responsible for this change. -
Lamarck
According to Lamarck, organisms adapt to their environments and then have the power to pass those changes on to their offspring. -
James Hutton
James is considered to be the founder of modern Geology. His studies of the rock formations of his native Scotland helped him to formulate his most famous work. -
Comte de Buffon
He believed that the earth must be much older than 6000 years. In 1774, in fact, he speculated that the earth must be at least 75,000 years old. He also suggested that humans and apes are related -
Lamarck2
He was also a soldier, biologist, academic, and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. -
Sergei Chetverikov
He was one of the early contributors to the development of the field of genetics. -
George Cuvier
George had the same idea has Lamarck, and was trying to see if he was correct -
Charles Lyell
He was also obsessed with Lamarcks work. Lyell paradoxically made Lamarck's views better known in the English-speaking world than they ever had been. -
Sewall Wright
He was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. He was founder of theoretical population genetics. & discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of methods of computing it in pedigrees. -
Ronald Fisher
He developed ideas on sexual selection, mimicry and the evolution of dominance. -
Bernhard Rensch
He is probably best known as one of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis, which he popularised in Germany. -
Theodosius Dobzhansky
He was a prominent geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for his work in shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis. -
Alexander Oparin
He reasoned that atmospheric oxygen prevents the synthesis of certain organic compounds that are necessary building blocks for the evolution of life. -
George Gaylord
He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. -
Abiogenesis
The study of how biological life arises from inorganic matter through natural processes, and the method by which life on Earth arose. -
Spontaneous generation
Is an obsolete principle regarding the origin of life from inanimate matter, which held that this process was a commonplace and everyday occurrence, as distinguished from univocal generation, or reproduction from parents. -
James Ussher
He was a prolific scholar, who most famously published a chronology that purported to establish the time and date of the creation as the night preceding Sunday, 23 October 4004 BC, according to the proleptic Julian calendar. -
Carl Linnaeus
He became the first to develop principles for defining genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them, binomial nomenclature.
