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James Ussher
This belief that the earth and life on it are only about 6000 years old fit neatly with the then prevalent theory of the "Great Chain of Being." This held that God created an infinite and continuous series of life forms, each one grading into the next, from simplest to most complex, and that all organisms, including humans, were created in their present form relatively recently and that they have remained unchanged since then. -
Carolus Linnaeus
Linnaeus was a first class scientist. His most important contribution to science was his logical classification system for all living things which he proposed in his book Systema Naturae, first published in 1735. In this and subsequent works, he described plants and animals on the basis of physical appearance and method of reproduction. He classified them relative to each other according to the degree of their similarities. He used a binomial nomenclature in naming them. That is to say, o -
Pierre Louis Maupertuis
Pierre-Louis Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. he became the Director of the Academie des Science, and the first President of the Berlin Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great. Maupertuis made an espedition to Lapland to determine the shape of the earth. -
Comte de Buffon
Comte de Buffon , actually 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. In 1774, in fact, he speculated that the earth must be at least 75,000 years old. He also suggested that humans and apes are related. Buffon was careful to hide his radical views in a limited edition 44 volume natural history book series called Histoire Naturel -
Erasmus Darwin
Erasmus was an English country physician, poet, and amateur scientist. 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 wrote of his ideas about evolution in poems and a relatively obscure two volume scientific publication entitled Zoonomia; -
Thomas Malthus
Thomas Malthus's theory was that populations can produce many more offspring than can possibly survive on the limited resources generally available. According to Malthus, poverty and disease were natural outcomes that resulted from overpopulation. Malthus also believed that divine forces were ultimately responsible for such outcomes, which, though natural, were designed by God -
Jean-Baptiste Lamark
Lamarck believed that microscopic organisms appear spontaneously from inanimate materials and then evolve, gradually and progressively into more complex forms through a constant striving for perfection. The ultimate product of this goal-oriented evolution was thought by Lamarck to be humans. -
Charles Lyell
He believed that there primarily have been slower, progressive changes. In his three volume Principles of Geology (1830-1833), 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 Robert Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin's theory of evolution was that all life has descended from ancestors. This means that more complex creatures had developed from more simple ancestor's, naturally, overtime. This means the more aided creatures in survival survive to then pass on their better characteristics to the next generation. This then means that the human race and over life on the planet has improved over time. -
Russell Wallace
Wallace’s intelligent evolution limits the power of natural selection to effect biological change. It suggests that in those areas of the biological world beyond the scope of natural selection’s operations, some purposive intelligence must be called upon to explain their existence. -
Lynn Margulis
Margulis proposed that some of the organelles of eukaryotic cells were actually at one time their own prokaryotic cells that were engulfed by a bigger prokaryotic cell in a mutualistic relationship. -
Marlene Zuk
Zuks research centers on sexual selection and the effects of parasites on mate choice and the evolution of secondary sex characters. I am also interested in the influence of parasites on host ecology and behavior.
