-
100
Anaximander of Miletus
(600BC) He proposed that the first animals lived in water, in the coursework of a wet phase of the Earth's past, & that the first land-dwelling ancestors of mankind must have been born in water, & only spent part of their life on land. -
100
Empedocles
(490–430 BC) He argued that what they call birth and death in animals are the mingling and separations of elements which cause the limitless "tribes of mortal things". Specifically, the first animals and plants were like disjointed parts of the ones they see today. -
100
Titus Lucretius Carus
(50 BC) He wrote the poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), which provides the best surviving explanation of the ideas of the Greek Epicurean philosophers which describes the development of the cosmos, the Earth, living things, & human society through purely naturalistic mechanisms, without any reference to supernatural involvement. -
Jul 1, 1100
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas went even farther than Augustine of Hippo in arguing that scriptural texts like Genesis ought to not be interpreted in a literal way that conflicted with or constrained what natural philosophers learned about the workings of the natural world. They felt that the autonomy of nature was a sign of God's goodness and that there was no conflict between the idea of a divinely created universe, and the idea that the universe may have evolved over time through natural mechanisms.[30] Howe -
Jul 1, 1337
Ibn Khaldun
He wrote the Muqaddimah in which they asserted that humans developed from "the world of the monkeys", in a method by which "species become more numerous" In chapter one they wrote: "This world with all the created things in it's a sure order and solid construction. It shows nexuses between causes and things caused, combinations of some parts of creation with others, and transformations of some existent things in to others, in a pattern that is both outstanding and limitless." -
Louis Maupertuis
He wrote of natural modifications occurring in the work of reproduction & accumulating over the work of plenty of generations, producing races & even new species, a description that anticipated in general terms the idea of natural selection -
G. L. L. Buffon
He suggested that what most people often called species were well-marked varieties, modified from an original form by environmental factors. For example, they believed that lions, tigers, leopards and house felines might all have a common ancestor. They further speculated that the 200 or so species of mammals then known might have descended from as few as 38 original animal forms. Buffon's evolutionary ideas were limited; they believed each of the original forms had arisen through spontaneous g -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
He did not think that all living things shared a common ancestor but that simple forms of life were created continuously by spontaneous generation. They also believed that an innate life force drove species to become more complex over time, advancing up a linear ladder of complexity that was related to the great chain of being. Lamarck recognized that species were adapted to their surroundings. -
Charles Darwin
He was able to prove that organisms could evolve without any supernatural involvement. The idea of evolution was widely accepted in scientific circles within a few years of the publication of Origin, but the acceptance of natural choice as its driving mechanism was much less widespread. The major options to natural choice in the late 19th century were theistic evolution, neo-Lamarckism, orthogenesis, and saltationism. -
R.A. Fisher
Fisher showed that the continuous variation measured by the biometricians could be produced by the combined action of plenty of discrete genes, and that natural choice could change gene frequencies in a population, leading to evolution. In a series of papers beginning in 1924, another British geneticist, J.B.S. Haldane, applied statistical analysis to real-world examples of natural choice, such as the evolution of industrial melanism in peppered moths, and showed that natural choice worked at an -
Stephen Jay Gould
He revived earlier ideas of heterochrony, alterations in the relative rates of developmental processes over the coursework of evolution, to account for the generation of novel forms, and, with the evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin, wrote an influential paper in 1979 proposing that a change in biological structure, or even a structural novelty, could arise incidentally as an accidental result of choice on another structure, than through direct choice for that particular adaptation. They cal