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400
Plato and Aristotle
the ancient Greek philosophers believed life evolved slowly, and gradually, but in 400 B.C, Plato and Aristlotle believed that life existed in a perfect and unchanged world. That view was believed by the public for over 2000 years. -
Jan 1, 1500
16th Century
In the 16th century, most people believed every specie was created indepentantly of each other, and life was unchanged since its creation. -
Buffon
Buffon believed life forms were unchanging and were organized into a hierarchy with god at the top and humans underneath. It was also widely accepted that the Earth was 6000 years old -
Cuvier
the father of paleontology, Cuvier noticed there were different fossils in each strata of rock, and the deeper stratum contained fossils more dissimilar from the modern species. He found that new species appeared and disappeared over time, and species could become extinct. Cuvier then suggested that the Earth experienced many destructive events, such as volcanoes, floods and landslides, which he called revolutions. -
Lyell
A geologist, he believed that the changes were slow and continuous, like erosion, instead of catastrophic events. he also suggested that the Earth was older than 6000 years. -
Lamark
Lamark proposed te idea that traits acquired through an organisms lifetime could be passed on to their offspring -
Darwin
Darwin sailed on the HMS Beagle to the Galapagos Islands and around South America. He discovered many distinct organisms not found anywhere else in the world. His voyage home was spent sorting out the new organisms he found. He proposed that organisms were not scattered randomly throughout te world. In his book, the Origin of Species, he proposed two ideas; Present forms of life have arisen by descent and modification from ancestral species and the mechanism for modification is Natural Selection -
Malthus and Wallace
Malthus proposed that populations produce far more offspring than their environments can support, and were eventually reduced by starvation and disease. Wallace came to the same conclusion as Darwin in which Natural Selection was a mechanisn for modification -
Theory of Evolution
-Organisms produce more offspring than can possibly survive. -There is an incredible amount of variation within a species.
-Some variations will enable an organism to better survive in its environment.
-A trait occurs in higher and higher frequency as time progresses.
