History of Evolution Flashcards
cosmologies
explanatory models of how the world came to be, stories+explanations+thought-out ideas based on observation of the natural world
great chain of being
god, angels, humans, animals, plants, etc
early western cosmology
earth with moon circling it, and moveable stars circling it, and various spheres circling it
plato cosmology
believed the world was Perfect, fixed and unchangeable, but organized into a hierarchical scheme
aristotle cosmology
studied under plato, believed the world was not quite as fixed or unchangeable as plato did
James Usher
took the oldest scientific document available (bible) and looking at the generations (begets), tracking from adam to jesus christ and calculated the earth was created in 4400 BC
Karl von Linne “Carlos Linnaeus”
1707-1778; published his major work called systema naturae (1750); organized nature into a classification system “genus species”
Georges Cuvier
1796 - published theory of catastrophism; catastrophe is a mechanism of change in the world; major disasters happened that wiped out animals
william smith
1815 - explains stratigraphy; noted that the stratum of rock tended to contain fossils that resembled each other; noted when he can identify particular types of rock he’d find the same fossils in that type of rock; noticed the layers of rock were sequential and the oldest was at the bottom; helped show the earth is old af
thomas burnette and robert hooke
important in geology
uniformatarianism
idea that all physical processes that we can observe in the world today have been going on for a long time, and have acted on the earth in the past
charles lyell
“principles of geology”; consolidated all the info they’d been collecting and put it all so far
Georges LeClerc “Count Buffon”
1774 - argued the world is v ancient
Christian Jurgensen Thomsen
curator of danish museum, told to organise old art; organized by technology stone/bronze/iron
