chap 16 scientists

Aristole

• great chain of being - organized animals — lowest form of life to highest

• influenced Europeans

Wallace

• Distribution of animals

• shared traits - common ancestors - but how on separate continents?

Cuvier

• many animals that existed - extinct

• Earth is shaped by sudden events that can cause extinctions like catastrophic geological events) - incorrect (geological process have no changed)

Darwin

•  glyptodons —> common traits with modern armadillo - related or common ancestor?

• Read essay of Thomas Malthus

•  finch species of the Galápagos archipelago island - resembled those in South America

• explored fitness and adaption (beak sizes)

•  Darwin realized that individuals with adaptive traits would tend to leave more offspring than their less fit rivals, a process he named natural selectionHe understood that natural selection causes a population to change- drives evolution.

• He had the same hypothesis as Wallace.

Lyell

• He came up with the idea that gradual, everyday geologic processes such as erosion could have sculpted Earth’s current landscape over the span of time (theory of uniformity)

•  He thought it must have taken millions of years to sculpt Earth’s surface

• He inspired Darwin in a way. 

Malthus

• proposed the idea that famine, disease and war limit the size of human populations

• beyond capacity of environment - run out of food

• competition for limited resources - some struggle to survive and some don’t