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John ray
He was an english naturalist who wrote a book and described 18,600 types of plants. He also gave the first definition of species based upon common descent. -
Carolus Linnaeus
He was a Swedish naturalist who wrote the book "systema naturae" which classified all organisms. These classifications are used today still. He also believed that god hybridized animals to make new ones. -
Comte de Buffon
He was a french naturalist who developed our definition of a species. He believed that organisms were made by god and that man kind was the most important creation of god. -
Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis
He wrote a book called "Systeme de la Nature" and "Essai de Cosmologie" about survival of the fittest and thought that speciation took place by chance. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
He created a theory of evolution which included the idea that traits could be acquired and then passed along to offspring. 1801, he published Système des animaux sans vertèbres, a major work on the classification of invertebrates, a term that he made himself. -
Sir Charles Lyell
He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which was published in 1833. -
Alfred Russel Wallace
He was a British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist. He is best known for independently suggesting a theory of evolution due to natural selection. This theory prompted Charles Darwin to publish a theory of his own. -
Charles Darwin
He developed the idea of natural selection. He also spent 20 years writing his book 'On the Origin of Species'. -
Ernst Haeckel
He was a German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species. He also mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and made many terms in biology. He did not believe in natural selection. -
Theodosius Dobzhansky
He was a geneticist and evolutionary biologist, and a central figure in the field of evolutionary biology for shaping the unifying modern evolutionary synthesis. -
Stephen Jay Gould
He was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. Gould's most significant contribution to science was the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which he developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. -
Richard Dawkins
Since Dawkins is an athiest, he strongly believes in evolution. His book,The Selfish Gene, popularised the gene-centred view of evolution. -
Elizabeth Pennisi
She was a molecular evolutionist and explained how the genome readies itself for evolution.
