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Carolus Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist, published Systema Naturae, which includes the common modern naming system of binomial nomenclature, or the naming of species with two names (i.e. Homo sapiens, for humans).
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Georges Cuvier, a highly respected French scientist, was born, He is known as the father of Paleontology. Also well known for his denial of any sort of evolutionary theory, by his study of the fossil record.
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James Hutton, a Scottish scientist and physician, published a set of theories explaining the geology of the Earth, among them the concept of geologic (or "deep") time, and that the Earth gradually changes over time.
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Thomas Robert Malthus publishes the first edition of "An Essay on the Principle of Population." After much refinement, the 6th edition of this book was cited by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in development of the theory of natural selection. He theorized that continued population growth would outgrow current resources.
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Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, a French naturalist, published his theory of evolution. His theory was that evolution occurred through the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or the use/disuse theory.
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Charles Lyell publishes "Principles of Geology." This pushed a uniformitarian view of geology, or the theory that forces in the past are the same as forces in the present, and that we can use the forces present today to infer things about the past.
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Charles Darwin, then very young and still a student, joins the voyage of the HMS Beagle as a naturalist.
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Alfred Russel Wallace publishes a paper coming to some of the same conclusions as Darwin, including natural selection. Darwin's friends present both Wallace's and Darwin's theories at the Linnean Society.
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Darwin, suffering from sickness both in himself and his family , finishes his book "The Origin of Species" and publishes it. It becomes wildly popular.
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Mendel's works with pea plants published, setting the background for the basis of natural selection.
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August Weismann publishes findings detailing how important DNA is to heredity, along with germ cell theory - the theory that inheritance only takes place by means of germ cells such as egg and sperm, and that other cells do not pass on their genes.
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Walter Sutton proposed that chromosomes were the basis for Mendelian inheritance of characteristics.
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DNA is proven to be the genetic material by which inheritance passes from one generation to the next, and thus is the blueprint for evolution.
