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350
Aristotle (350 BC)
The Greek philosopher, Aristotle, studied marine animals and developed an epigenetic model of evolution. He also developed a classification system for all animals. -
400
Chinese Beliefs
Chinese thinkers such as Zhuangzi possed the idea that species change overtime. philosophers in China at the time thought that species had developed differing attributes in response to differing environments.This helped evolution in saything that species change over time due to changing enviorments. -
500
Xenophanes (500 BC)
Xenophanes studied fossils and put forth various theories on the evolution of life. -
520
Anaximander (520 BC)
He introduced an idea of evolution, stating that life started as slime in the oceans and eventually moved to drier places. He also brought up the idea that species evolved over time. -
Jan 1, 1000
Golden Age
In the Islamic Golden Age of the 8th to the 13th centuries, philosophers explored more philosical ideas wich said that non-living things can become living: "from mineral to plant, from plant to animal, and from animal to man"This delevopled the idea that organisms can come from other things. -
Jan 1, 1260
Thomas Aquinas
Believed that life could form from non-living creatures and from plants. -
Jan 1, 1332
Abdolrahman ibn Mohammad ibn Kheldon
"...Then we must take a look at the world of species, and observe that how it begins from mineral, then flora and fauna. and they are delicately gradual.
as the minerals wrap, we encounter with seedless plants, and then the plants wrap up with trees like palm and grapevine and then animals start with species like snails that are numb and animalia has been slowly evolved until it reached the stage of humans, that have intelligence and are more evolved than Hominoidea." -
John Ray
The concept of genus and species was actually developed in the late 1600's by him. He also placed us in the order Primates (a larger, more inclusive category than our genus) along with all of the apes, monkeys, and prosimians. This was very controversial at the time since it implied that people were part of nature, along with other animals and plants. In addition, it meant that we were biologically closer to the other primates than to all other animals. -
Carolus Linnaeus
His 180 books are filled with precise descriptions of nature, but he did little analysis or interpretation. This is to be expected since Linnaeus apparently believed that he was just revealing the unchanging order of life created by God. -
George Louis Leclerc
Said that living things do change through time. He speculated that this was somehow a result of influences from the environment or even chance. He believed that the earth must be much older than 6000 years. -
Immanuel Kant
Developed a concept of descent that is relatively close to modern thinking; he did in a way anticipate Darwinian thinking. Based on similarities between organisms, Kant speculated that they may have come from a single ancestral source. -
Erasmus 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. He also suggested that the earth and life on it must have been evolving for "millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind." -
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
Theorized on the nature of heredity and how new species come into being. He thought that speciation took place by chance events in nature, rather than by spontaneous generation as was believed at the time. -
Thomas Malthus
Theory of population growth was in the end what inspired Darwin to develop the theory of natural selection. Populations produce many more offspring than can possibly survive on the limited resources generally available. poverty, famine, and disease were natural outcomes that resulted from overpopulation. However, Malthus believed that divine forces were ultimately responsible for such outcomes, which, though natural, were designed by God. -
George Cuvier
Was the first scientist to document extinctions of ancient animals and was an internationally respected expert on dinosaurs. However, he rejected the idea that their existence implied that evolution had occurred--he dogmatically maintained the "fixity" of species. -
Charles Bonnet
The females of each organism contain the next generation in miniature form. He believed that natural catastrophes sparked evolutionary changes in organisms. His idea of evolution was analogous to organisms climbing a ladder of life, with animals becoming intelligent, primates becoming human, and humans becoming angels. -
Carolus Linnaeus Death
Carolus Linnaeus dies on January 10th, 1778. -
Charles Lyell
Lyell documented the fact that the earth must be very old and that it has been subject to the same sort of natural processes in the past that operate today in shaping the land. These forces include erosion, earthquakes, glacial movements, volcanoes, and even the decomposition of plants and animals. -
Charles Darwin 1st Theory Published
On February 5 1838, the first volume of "Zoology" was published from the Voyage of Darwin, 1836 Darwin started discovering that his thoughts were more like Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's thoughts about evolution, so Darwin decided to not publish any of his transmutation theories for many years to come. -
William Thompson
Reportedly estimated the earth to be just 100 million years old, basing his estimate on a model that posited that the earth began as a molten mass of rock and had cooled steadily to its present temperature, with only the last 20 or so million years being cool enough for life as as we know it. Later Kelvin revised his estimate several times, settling in a range from 20 to 40 million years.
