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Jan 4, 1581
James Ussher
He studied the Bible throughly, and he believed that the creation of Earth and life was October 23 in 4004 B.C. His belief seems to fit with the "Great Chain of Being" theory. -
John Ray
Ray was also a botanist, and based on research, he believed they were created based on the floral reprodcutive organs -
Carolus Linnaeus
Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist who created the "binomial nomenclature" which is knowing how plants and animals are given names -
Comte de Buffon
Buffon was a French naturalist, mathematician, cosmotologist, and encyclopedic author. His works had influenced the next two generations of naturalists and they followed his example. -
Charles Bonnet
He was a botanist also, and a very diligent studier in all of his research. But gradually, his eyesight beame weaker and he had vivid hallucinations. This diesease today, is called "Charles Bonnet Syndrome". -
Immanuel Kant
Kant was a German philosopher from Konigsberg who researched and lectured philosophy and anthropology. His works influenced many German thinkers in his lifetime. -
James Hutton
Hutton solely believed in the "uniformitarianism" theory, which is an assumption that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, had always operated in the universe, in the past as well. -
Erasmus Darwin
This was the grandfather of Charles Darwin, and Charles had followed in his footsteps in the study of evolution. But, Erasmus' idea was that all life had come from one common ancestor. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Lamarck invented the theory of "inheritance of acquired characteristics" that stated that an organism could pass on, to its offspring, any characteristics it had acquired in its lifetime. -
Pierre-Louis Moreau
He was a French mathematician and philosopher, he also believed in the "spontaneous generation" theory, just like Lamarck. -
Thomas Malthus
Malthus was, like many people, a believer in the theory that God was responsible for the creation of all things, not like what Darwin believed years later. -
George Cuvier
He did not have the same idea of evolution as others, because he just believed that animals left imprints on fossils, and they remained unchanged on the fossil. -
Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire
Geoffroy believed in the underlying unity of organismal design and the possibility of the tranmutation of species throughout time and history. -
Sir William Lawrence
He had published two books of his lectures which contained pre-Darwinian ideas on man's nature and, effectively, on evolution. He was forced to withdraw them because they were rules "blasphemous" to other beliefs. -
Robert Edmond Grant
Grant was a close colleague of Geoffroy. He was an expert in the biology of sea sponges and sea slugs and considered that the same laws of life affected all organisms from monad (living organisms) to man. -
Charles Lyell
Lyell had spent his life travelling and making observations of geological formations that he saw on his travels. Many years later, he had also influenced Charles Darwin in his evolution study. -
Spontaneous Generation
This is the action of new life suddenly being created from other life, such as eggs or other parents, but they come to be for an unknown reason. -
Death of Erasmus Darwin
Darwin had quietly passed away in his study while writing more of his ideas and theories at 70 years old. Charles soon took over with his research. -
Immanuel Kant Death
He died in East Prussia where he was born. It was slow and agonizing because he had a severe stomach infection and he slowly starved to death. -
Richard Owen
Owen believed in the theory of evolutionary developmental biology, and by looking into this, he believed evolution was a more complex process than what others had said.
