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Jean- Baptiste Lamark who is a French naturlised published the first theory of evolution. His theory was that evolution occurred through inheritance and you got characteristics.
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Alfred Russel Wallace independently comes up with the theory of evolution by natural selection and then co-published with Charles Darwin.
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Charles Darwin publishes ‘on the origin of species.’
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James Mark Baldwin suggests that adaptation can arise and evolve from plasticity without being inherited. This concept is later referred to as the Baldwin Effect. Douglas Spalding, Conwyn Lloyd & Henry Osborn had also presented similar ideas at the same time.
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Wilhelm Johannsen, who is a Danish biologist, provides basic terminology for genetics and explains that genotypes is the genetic construction of an organism and the phenotype is the physical characteristics of an organism.
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Thomas Hunt Morgan established the chromosomal theory of heredity. He began to conduct experiments and breed with fruit flies. Morgan confirmed Mendelian laws of inheritance and the hypothesis that genes are located on chromosomes.
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Genetic Material was verified in 1943. DNA was proven to be the genetic material which traits were passed from one generation to another; therefore it was the blueprint for evolution.
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Francis Crick, James Watson and Rosalind Franklin discovered the chemical structure of DNA and that it encodes genetic information.
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Allen Wilson and Marie-Claire King who are Berkeley biochemists found that humans share 99 percent of their DNA with chimpanzees.
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Mary Jane West-Eberhard publishes Developmental Plasticity and Evolution, this publication talks about environmentally generated variation in evolution.