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Jean Baptiste de Lamarck
Lamarck was the first to claim that humans had evolved from a lower species. His hypothesis stated that all living things built up from the most simple all the way up to humans. He believed that new species spontaneously generated and body parts or organs that were not used would just shrivel up and go away. -
James Hutton
James Hutton postulated that the earth was formed by an ancient progression of natural events, including erosion, disruption and uplift. -
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier suggested that the earth was 6,000 years old. He hypothesised that since all of the different animals he had studied have specialised and different anatomy, they must not have changed at all since the creation of Earth. -
Charles Lyell
Charles Lyell's most famous work was Principles of Geology. The most important idea to come out of this book is Uniformitarianism. This theory states that all the natural laws of the universe that are in existence now existed at the beginning of time. He was not a firm believer in evolution until Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. -
Alfred Russel Wallace
Alfred Wallace is best known for independently proposing the theory of evolution due to natural selection that prompted Charles Darwin to publish his own theory. -
Charles Darwin
Charles Darwin established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. -
August Weismann
August Weismann disproved the theory that acquired characteristics could be inherited. He also proposed the germ plasm theory: the theory suggesting that while the body lives for only one generation, hereditary material is immortal and passed from generation to generation without change. -
William Bateson
William Bateson was the first to call the discipline "genetics". He has since come to be known as the "founder of genetics". He opposed Darwin's view of gradualism and hypothesised that evolution actually happened in short, quick bursts in what is now called punctuated equilibrium. -
Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr proposed that when a population of organisms becomes separated from the main group by time or geography, they eventually evolve different traits and can no longer interbreed. -
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins introduced into evolutionary biology the influential concept that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
