-
384
384 - 322 B.C.
Plato's student aristotle categorized all organisms into a linear hierarchy that called the "Ladder of Nature" -
427
427 - 347 B.C.
Plato proposed that each object on Earth is merely a temporary reflection of its divinely inspired "ideal form" -
1707 - 1788
Georges Louis Leclerc suggested that the original creation provided a relatively small number of founding species -
1726 - 1797
Lyell considered the forces of wind, water,and volcanoes and concluded that there was no need to invoke catastrophes to explain the findings of geology -
1744 - 1829
Jean Baptiste Lamarck propose a mechanism for evolution -
1769 - 1832
Georges Cuvier advanced the idea of catastrophism -
1769 - 1839
William Smith recognized that certain fossils were always found in the same layers of rock -
1797 - 1875
Cuvier's hypothesis of a world shaped by successive catastrophes was challenged by the work of the geologist Charles Lyell -
1809
Lamarck published a book in wich he hypothesized that organism evolved through yhe inheritance of acquired characteristics -
1842
Darwin was the first to propose a mechanism for evolution
