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James Hutton
was a Scottish physician, geologist, naturalist, chemical manufacturer and experimental agriculturalist. His work helped to establish the basis of modern geology His theories of geology and geologic time, also called deep time, came to be included in theories which were called plutonism and uniformitarianism. He is also credited as the first scientist to publicly express the Earth was alive and should be considered a superorganism. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Lamarck stressed two main themes in his biological work. The first was that the environment gives rise to changes in animals. He cited examples of blindness in moles, the presence of teeth in mammals and the absence of teeth in birds as evidence of this principle. The second principle was that life was structured in an orderly manner and that many different parts of all bodies make it possible for the organic movements of animals. Although he was not the first thinker to advocate organic e -
Georges Cuvier
Known for establishing the fields of stratigraphy and comparative anatomy; the first thorough, published documentation of faunal succession in the fossil record; making extinction an accepted scientific phenomenon; opposition to gradualistic theories of evolution -
Charles Lyell
Lyell was one of the first prominent scientists to support The Origin of Species—though he never fully accepted natural selection as the driving engine behind evolution. In fact, Lyell was instrumental in arranging the peaceful co-publication of the theory of natural selection by Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in 1858, after each discovered it independently -
john Phillips
John Phillips was an English geologist. In 1841 he published the first global geologic time scale based on correlating strata world wide based on fossils, helping to standardize terminology including the term Mesozoic, which he invented. -
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin, (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. -
Richard Goldschmidt
Richard Benedict Goldschmidt (April 12, 1878 – April 24, 1958) was a German-born American geneticist. He is considered the first to integrate genetics, development, and evolution. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, sex determination, and heterochrony. -
Alfred Wegener
Alfred Wegener was a German geologist from the early 20th century, that was the first to theorize, and provided evidence of continental drift. He provided fossil, land feature, and climate evidence for 'continental drift' and the existence of a previous super- continent called Pangaea. -
Julian Huxley
Huxley was the most important biologist after August Weismann to insist on natural selection as the primary agent in evolution. -
Sewall Wright
He is the discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of methods of computing it in pedigrees. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding of members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, -
Daphne Fairbairn
Dr. Fairbairn is an evolutionary biologist with wide-ranging expertise in quantitative genetics, migration, natural selection, and sexual selection and sexual dimorphism in size and morphology. Her work is based strongly on empirical studies and includes organisms ranging from insects to mice and fish.
