History of Evolutionary Biology (Names)

Plato

• Essentialism

• The fixity of species

Aristotle

• Scala Naturae

• The great chain of being

• Every species in its place, and a place for every species

Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778)

• established the classification system used today

• Systema Naturae and the role of natural science and classification as the elucidator of God’s wisdom

• Relatedness based on similarity of design resembles today’s phelogenies

Comte De Buffon

• Internal mould common to species in a genus, but each species rose and modified differently in different environments

• Mixture of special creation → the creator made the initial species then adapted and changed to fit the environment → many originated which then led to organisms today.

Reverend William Paley

• “watches need a watchmaker”

• A convergence of science and theology

• No evolution or common descent

• Everything was created in present form

James Hutton and Charles Lyell

• Natural selection and geologist respectively

• Diversity of transformational concepts in the 18th century

• A modifiable chain of being → spontaneous generation

• Newtons law applied to organisms and dictated the changes, no other interventions

• Laws of the universe is the same over time

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829)

• Argued spontaneous generation and transformation/transmutation

• inheritance of acquired characteristics (adapted from others)

• Species would generate but then transform to adapt to environment

George Cuvier

• Anatomist

• Demonstrated extinctions in past but denounced evolution or transformation

• Father of comparative anatomy

Charles Darwin

• A naturalist on the HMS Beagle mapping expedition

• Wrote about his expedition, collected plants, animals, and fossils

• Wrote “On the Origin of Species

• Key change in iconography of life → life is a bush rather than a ladder

Malthus

• Human demographer

• Saw how societies would grow until resources would run out, then start wars for more resources

• Wrote Population, which then Darwin read. Helped him conceive natural selection

Alfred Russell Wallace

• Father of biogeology

• Noticed that species would undergo similar experiences of growing until running out of resources and fighting for more, only the better adapted would survive

• Contacted Darwin to present the information that life is not a ladder but rather a bush.

  • little traction

Thomas Huxley

• Darwin’s Bulldog

• Speak for Darwin in public in oral debates

• First to say humans were related to apes

Ernst Haeckel

• Introduced terms like phylogeny

• Influential illustrator

• Popularized tree analogy

Ernst Mayr

• Pointed out the fundamental different world view evolution presented

• Typologist → type is real, variation is illusion

  • Argued about idea form, variation is noise and not real

• Evolutionist → type is illusion, variation is real

  • True type/form is not real