Evolutionary Scientist Flashcards
(8 cards)
Plato and Aristotle
Believed that organisms could not and did not change .
Buffon
One of the first people to challenge publicly the idea that life forms are unchanging was naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788). In 1749, he published the 44-volume Histoire Naturelle, which compiled his understandings of the natural world. In this work, Buffon noted the similarities between humans and apes, and speculated that they might have a common ancestor. In other writings, Buffon suggested that Earth was much older than 6000 years, as was commonly believed.
Mary Anning
In 1811, in the Lyme Regis cliffs of coastal England, a preteen named unearthed the ancient remains of a bizarre-looking sea creature. Later identified as a prehistoric fish called Ichthyosaurus, the specimen did not look like any animal known to be living during Anning’s time. Also strange were the fossilized skeletons of a
marine reptile known as a plesiosaur and a flying reptile called a pterosaur,
which Anning discovered when she was a young woman. Along with other fossil finds, Anning’s discoveries made people question a widely believed idea—that all forms of life came into existence at the same time and had never changed.
George Cuvier
One of the fathers of paleontology (study of fossils) He found that there were different fossils found in different layers of soil (strata). He also found evidence of new species appearing and others disappearing in the fossil record. Because he was strongly opposed to the idea of evolution at the time he proposed the theory of catastrophism. According to this idea, catastrophes such as floods , diseases , droughts etc… periodically destroyed species that were living in a particular area. He hypothesized that the catastrophes, which he called revolutions, corresponded to the boundaries between each layer. After a catastrophe nearby species would move into the area which explain the appearance of “new species”
Jean Bastiste Lamarck
Lamarck was one of the first scientists to try to explain how evolution occurs. He did not believe that species became extinct. He reasoned instead that they simply changed into a new species.(1809)
His explanation of evolution had 2 main parts
1.Law of Use and Disuse
According to this principle the more an animal uses a particular part of its body the stronger and better developed that part becomes. In the same way a less used part becomes weaker and less developed.
2.Inheritance of Acquired Traits
He believed that the characteristics an organism developed through use and disuse could be passed on to its offspring.
Charles Lyell
Scottish geologist Charles Lyell (1797–1875) During his voyage Darwin read Principles of Geology by Charles Lyell. Lyell proposed that geological processes operate at the same rate in the past as they do today. He proposed that the earth was very old and was constantly changing for millions of years and that it was still changing. This idea was called uniformitarianism. Darwin started to think about living organisms in much the same way. He hypothesized that the slow subtle changes in the populations of organisms could translate into substantial changes over time much like geological processes.
Thomas Malthus
When Darwin returned from his trip to the Galapagos he was convinced that organisms evolve, however he did not have an explanation of how it happened. At his time he read an essay by Thomas Malthus called the Essay on the Principle of Populations. (Darwin Read it 1838 but it was written much earlier in 1798 and later revised) According to this essay plant and animal populations grew much faster than their food supply and as a result a population is reduced by starvation, disease and in the case of humans, war. In other words food increases arithmetically whereas populations increase exponentially. This led Darwin to think about the competition for resources that exist in a population. Developed the following theory
Alfred Russel Wallace
developed. the same theory as Darwin at the same time but Darwin was published first. Interesting that Darwin used the “descent with modification” instead of the word” evolution” in his first edition of “On the Origin of Species by Means Of Natural Selection”
