BIOL214 people

Anaximander (610-546 BC)

life arose in water, simpler forms preceded more complicated forms (only fragments of writing) 

Xenophanes (570-480 BC)

Cycles of moisture eroding land → mud → land (fossils of marine organisms) 

Herodotus (484-425 BC)

fossils of marine organisms in Egypt suggested it was once underwater 

Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Scala naturae, fossil seashells similar to modern ones on beach

Eratosthenes (276-194 BC)

Fossils of marine organisms existed

Strabo (64 BC - 24 AD)

mentioned fossil shells

Middle Ages (476-1500 CE)

Great Chain of Being (Hierarchy of living things: perfect → imperfect)

Ibn Sina (Avicenna) (980-1037)

fossils, uniformitarianism concept

Nicholaus Steno (1638-1689)

Dutch anatomists (catholic bishop) stratigraphy, tongue stones (thought they were shark teeth were turned to stone)

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778)

Taxonomy

Georges Buffon (1707-1788)

70,000 year old earth, life transformed when environment changed (adaptations/populations change over time)

James Hutton (1726-1797)

earth was very old, cycles of destruction and rebirth, father of modern geology

William Paley (1743-1805)

natural theology: the mechanical complexity of animal organs provided evidence for the existence of a divine creator, watch implies a watchmaker

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

evolution, microbes are continually generated spontaneously (ex: giraffe has long neck b/c the ones who stretched it could reach further and those ones lived longer)

Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

extinction was real, evolution was not (fossils are not like modern species and are not found on earth because they have gone extinct)

William Smith (1769-1839)

formalized stratigraphy, made first geological map

Charles Lyell (1797-1875)

uniformitarianism

Mary Anning (1799-1847)

multiple spectacular fossil discoveries in early 1800s, coprolites (bezoar stones) were fossilized feces

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

evolution through natural selection

Gregor Mendel (1822-1884)

mathematical patterns of heritable traits

Alfred Wallace (1823-1913)

evolution through natural selection (independently) 

Hugo de Vries (1848-1935)

rediscovered Mendel’s principles of heredity, mutation ideas