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384 BCE
Aristotle
Species are Permanent, perfect and don't evolve Aristotle believed that all living things could be arranged on a ladde of increasing complecity called the scala nature. He believed that each form of life had a spcific place on the lader and each spot was taken. -
Nov 14, 1452
Leonardo Da Vinci
He made observation on mountains and rivers, and he grasped that principle that rocks can be formed by deposition of sediments by water and can be eroded and carried the sea, in continuous grand cyle. -
Jul 5, 1494
Georgius Agricola
Agricola's observation was one of the first contributions of stratigraphic geology and would become important in understanding the arrgangment and origins of the rock of the eart. He wrote a book that gave description of minerals by physical properties. -
Antony Van Leeuwenhoek
Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria, free-living and parasitic protists, sperm cells , blood cells microscope nematodes and rotifer, and much more. His research open up and entire world of microsope life. -
Robert Hooke
Micrographic Hooke made one of the best compound microscopes of his time. He observed organisms such as insects, sponges and bird feathers. He discovered plant cells by lookming at the cell wall in cork tissue. -
Nicholas Stento
At first, Steno focused on the muscular system. He used geometry to show that when muscles contract, they change shape but not volume. later he found a resemblance between stony objects in rocks called 'tongue stones' and shark teeth. He said that tongue stones were once shark teeth in the months of living sharks. These sharks were buriedd in mud of sand which later beame dry land. -
John Ray
Classification
Ray was a naturalist and believed in natural theology, in his book Methodius Plantar Nova, he’s the first to classify plants into monocots and dicots. This method produced more natural results and wasn’t based on just on feature but instead on more similarities between species. -
Carolus Linnaeus
Taxonomy
Linnaeus developed a binomial system of naming organisms according to the genius and species. He started grouping species into a hierarchy of increasing general categories such as genus, family etc. -
Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buuffon
Buffon believed in organic change. He thought that the environment acted directly on organisms through what he called ‘organic particles’. Buffon also published Les Époques de la Nature in 1788 in which he suggested that the planet was much older that the 6,000 years old. -
Erasmus Darwin
He was one of the first to have a formal theory of evolution. He didn’t come up with natural selection, but he discussed the concept that life evolved from a single common ancestor. -
Georges Cuvier
Planetology
He realized that fossils with similar characteristics were grouped together in a layer of the earth. He discovered that the deeper that layer of the earth, the more different fossils were from modern life. -
Willian Smith
He observed that the layers of sedimentary rocks in any location contain fossils in a definition sequence. He said that this same sequence could be correlated between locations. He was the first person to use fossil as a toll for mapping rocks by their stratigraphic order. -
Etienne Geoffroy St.Hilarie
Geoffroy spent time trying to decide when structures in two organisms were homologous. His criteria was that structures in different organisms were that same if their parts were connected to each other in the same pattern. One of his Theories was that the segment external skeleton and jointed legs of insects were the same as that internal vertebrae and ribs of vertebrates which meant that insects live inside their own vertebrae and walk on their ribs. -
Adam Sedwick
Sedwick believed in catastrophism just like Cuvier. He believed that these catastropies destroyed much of earth’s life. He was opposed to Charles lyell’s idea of gradualism. However, Sedwick believed there could be possibility that at least some of the “catastrophic” changes implied by the rock record might be shown to be gradual. -
Patrick Matthew
He developed a theory of natural selection about thirty years before Darwin’s Origin of species. In 1831, Matthew published on Naval Timber and Arboriculture, a book on raising trees of the best quality for the construction on Royal Navy Ships. Matthew expressed his theory, based on his observations of how tree species might vary in form, and how artificial selection might improve cultivated trees. -
James Hutton
Gradualism
He challenged Cuvier, saying that a single event couldn’t have caused a change in the region. Instead the incidents are a gradual and slow change. For example, canyons are formed by rivers cutting through rock which can take many years. -
Thomas Malthus
Theory of population
He observed that plants and animals produce far more offspring’s compared to the ones that actually survive. He said humans are capable of overproducing also if they are left unchecked. Malthus believed that unless family size was regulated, men would die of famine because of overpopulation. -
Mary Anning
Mary Anning was credited with the first discovery of ichthyosaur fossils. She helped discover the first specimen of ichthyosaurus to be known by the scientific community of London. More importantly, she discovered the first plesiosaur. -
William Paley
Natural Theology
Paley was popular for his book which stated that the nature of God could be understood by looking at his creations. He compared organism to watches, saying that organisms are much more complex that watches. Just like watches are made by someone, animals are made by god. -
Richard Owen
Owen was a lecture in comparative anatomy. In 1837, Owen gave his first series of Huterian Lectures to the public. These popular lectures were attended by royalty and many important figures in England. Charles Darwin also attended these lectures. -
Jean Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, published his theory of evolution. His theory was that evolution occurred through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or the use/disuse theory.
• Use and disuse – parts of the body used to cope with environment become larger and stronger, while unused ones deteriorate.
• Inheritance of Acquired characteristic – Changes that and organism acquires during its lifetime can be passed on to0 offspring. -
Thomas Henry Huxley
One of the first adherents to Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and did more than anyone else to advance its acceptance amongst everyone. Huxley was so passionate of Darwin’s theory. But Huxley was not only the bulldog for Darwin’s theory, but was a great biologist, who did original research in zoology and palaeontology. Nor did he slavishly and uncritically swallow Darwin’s theory; he criticized seversal aspects of it, pointing out number of problems. -
Charles Lyell
Uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism came from gradualism. Lyell said that geological processes haven’t changed throughout earth’s history. For example, that rate of the forces that build or erode mountains are that same today as in the past. -
Charles Darwin
Theory of evolution
• Decent with Modification – All organisms are related through descent from some unknown ancestor that lived in the past. As the descendant of that ancestral organism moved into various habits, they adapted to their surrounding and specific ways of life.
• Natural Selection – The organisms that are able to survive the environment go on to live, while the ones incapable of living, die off and become extinct. -
Competition for Evolution
Alfred Russel Wallace publishes a paper coming to some of the same conclusions as Darwin, including natural selection. Darwin's friends present both Wallace's and Darwin's theories at the Linnean Society. -
Charles Darwin
Darwin published The Origin of Species. A publication that argues that the numerous traits and adaptations that differentiate species from each other also explain how species evolved over time and gradually diverged. -
Genetic material verified
DNA is proven to be the genetic material by which inheritance passes from one generation to the next, and thus is the blueprint for evolution.