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Pierre Louis Maupertuis
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Berlin Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great. Maupertuis made an expedition to Lapland to determine the shape of the earth. He is often credited with having invented the principle of least action.His work in natural history has its interesting points. -
Julien Offroy de La Mettrie
Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, French physician, atheist, mechanist and materialist; an infamous specimen of the Enlightenment. La Mettrie's Man a Machine (L'Homme Machine, 1748) is his main and most infamous work. He wrote his Man a Machine or rather he put on paper some vigorous thoughts about materialism, which he doubtless planned to rewrite. This work, which was bound to displease men who by their position are declared enemies of the progress of human reason. -
Jean-Baptiste de la Marck
Jean-Baptiste de la Marck, often just known as "Lamarck", was a French soldier, naturalist, academic and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws. In the modern era, Lamarck is remembered primarily for a theory of inheritance of acquired characters, called soft inheritance or Lamarckism. However, his idea of soft inheritance was, perhaps, a reflection of the folk wisdom of the time, accepted by many natural historians. -
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was a French naturalist who established the principle of "unity of composition". He was a colleague of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and expanded and defended Lamarck's evolutionary theories. Geoffroy's scientific views had a transcendental flavor (unlike Lamarck's materialistic views) and were similar to those of German morphologists like Lorenz Oken. He believed in the underlying unity of organismal design, and the possibility of the transmutation of species in time. -
Samuel george Morton
Samuel George Morton was an American physician and natural scientist. Samuel George Morton is often thought of as the originator of "American School" ethnography, a school of thought in antebellum American science that claimed the difference between humans was one of species rather than variety and is seen by some as the origin of scientific racism. -
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin was an English naturalist who realised and presented compelling evidence that all species of life have evolved over time from common ancestors, through the process he called natural selection. The fact that evolution occurs became accepted by the scientific community and much of the general public in his lifetime, while his theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution. -
Edward Blyth
Edward Blyth was an English zoologist and pharmacist. He was one of the founders of zoology in India. Blyth was born in London in 1810. In 1841 he travelled to India to become the curator of the museum of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal. He set about updating the museum's catalogues, publishing a Catalogue of the Birds of the Asiatic Society in 1849. He was prevented from doing much fieldwork himself, but received and described bird specimens from Hume, Tickell, Swinhoe and others. -
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, prominent classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era. Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, economics, politics, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. -
Gregor Johann Mendel
Gregor Johann Mendel was a Austrian priest and scientist, and is often called the father of genetics for his study of the inheritance of traits in pea plants. Mendel showed that the inheritance of traits follows particular laws, which were later named after him. The significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century. Its rediscovery prompted the foundation of the discipline of genetics. -
Alfred Russell Wallace
Alfred Russel Wallace, English naturalist, evolutionist, geographer, anthropologist, and social critic and theorist. Co-discoverer of the theory of natural selection and key player in the development of biogeography.He began work on the species problem in the mid-1850's while in the field, publishing little-noticed papers that argued for the fact of evolution on the basis of geographical distributions. -
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley was one of the first adherents to Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and did more than anyone else to advance its acceptance among scientists and the public alike. As is evident from the letter quoted above, Huxley was a passionate defender of Darwin's theory -- so passionate that he has been called "Darwin's Bulldog". -
Paul Belloni du Chaillu
Paul Belloni du Chaillu was a French-American traveler and anthropologist. He became famous in the 1860s as the first modern outsider to confirm the existence of gorillas, and later the Pygmy people of central Africa. He later researched the prehistory of Scandinavia. -
Friedrich Leopold August Weismann
Friedrich Leopold August Weismann was a German evolutionary biologist. Ernst Mayr ranked him the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin. Weismann became the Director of the Zoological Institute and the first Professor of Zoology at Freiburg. -
Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Haeckel was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny, ecology and the kingdom Protista. -
Cesare Lombroso
Cesare Lombroso was an Italian criminologist and physician, founder of the Italian School of Positivist Criminology. Lombroso rejected the established Classical School, which held that crime was a characteristic trait of human nature. -
Francis Crick
Francis Crick was an English molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of two co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, together with James D. Watson. He, Watson and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". -
James Lovelock
James Lovelock is the author of approximately 200 scientific papers, distributed almost equally among topics in Medicine, Biology, Instrument Science and Geophysiology. He has filed more than 50 patents, mostly for detectors for use in chemical analysis. One of these, the electron capture detector, was important in the development of environmental awareness. It revealed for the first time the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues and other halogen bearing chemicals. -
James Dewey Watson
James Dewey Watson is an American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA in 1953 with Francis Crick. Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". -
Stanley Lloyd Miller
Stanley Lloyd Miller was an American chemist and biologist who is known for his studies into the origin of life, particularly the Miller–Urey experiment which demonstrated that organic compounds can be created by fairly simple physical processes from inorganic substances. The experiment used conditions then thought to provide an approximate representation of those present on the primordial Earth. -
Lynn Margulis
Margulis realized that life’s most important division was not plants versus animals. Instead, the great divide came between bacteria and all other organisms—protoctists, fungi, plants, and animals. Members of the last four groups, whether microscopic or enormous, are composed of cells with nuclei. For her, the implication was clear: bacterial cells (without nuclei) are the basic units of life, and all other organisms (with nuclei) are composite multiples. -
John Craig Venter
John Craig Venter is an American biologist and entrepreneur, most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for his role in creating the first synthetic cell in 2010. Venter founded Celera Genomics, The Institute for Genomic Research and the J. Craig Venter Institute, now working at the latter to create synthetic biological organisms and to document genetic diversity in the world's oceans. -
Shinya Yamanaka
Shinya Yamanaka is a Japanese physician and stem cell researcher. In 2006, he and his team generated Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells - from adult mouse fibroblasts. In 2007, he and his team were able to generate Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells from human adult fibroblasts. He serves as a professor at the Institute for Frontier Medical Sciences at Kyoto University, as a senior investigator at the UCSF-affiliated J
