Evolution: Influential People/Historical Figures

Carl von Linnaeus

• Carl von Linnaeus is known as the father of taxonomy. Taxonomy is the classification of organisms hierarchically into groups based on similar structure and origin.

James Hutton

• James Hutton discovered that geological gradualism takes a long period of time, so the Earth must be over 5000 years old.

Charles Lyell

• Charles Lyell built on Hutton’s theory of gradualism and proposed uniformitarianism, the theory that the earth was shaped by processes and forces that still exist today

Thomas Malthus

• Thomas Malthus theorized that overproduction of populations can lead to limited resources and introduced the concepts of carrying capacity and natural selection

Georges Cuvier

• Georges Cuvier is known as the father of vertebrate paleontology. While excavating, he found that the older the strata, the less the fossils in that stratum looked like current life forms. He also came up with the theory of catastrophism, which viewed the geological history of the Earth as the alternation of long periods of relative calm with brief catastrophic events that immensely change the Earth

Charles Darwin

• Charles Darwin’s observations led to two new ideas concerning evolution. Those ideas were adaptations, which means that animals gain characteristics that enhances their survival and reproduction in a given environment, and that adaptations arise through natural selection, meaning individuals with favorable inherited traits produce more offspring than those with unfavorable inherited traits.

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