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1. GENERAL BIOLOGY 2
WEEK 3B – Development of Evolutionary Thought
Joanna Irene T. Florin
Missy A. Custodio

2. During the classical times, many ancient scientists
believed that all species on earth were unchangeable
based on the concept of essentialism (Winsor, 2003).
Their main argument was that if the creations of God
were perfectly crafted, why then would God fix or
change it?

3. Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - 1778) - known as the “Father
of Taxonomy”, a Swedish botanist, who took up the new
idea that plants reproduced sexually, using differences in
reproductive structures to develop a system for classifying
/naming plants. In the year 1735, he published his work,
Systema Naturae (“System of Nature”), which introduced
the hierarchical taxonomic categories: Kingdom-Phylum-
Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species. His research gave all
his specimens a descriptive Latin binomial, or two-word,
name. Thus, all modern classification systems have their
roots in Linnaeus’ system.

4. Thomas Robert Malthus (1766 –
1834) - An English cleric, scholar and
influential economist within the fields
of economics and demography. In his
1798 book An Essay on the Principle of
Population, he argued that human
populations have the potential to grow
faster than the resources they need.

5. Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) - developed a
theory of catastrophism which states that
natural history has been punctuated by
catastrophic events such as climate change and
volcanic eruption that altered that way life
developed and rocks were deposited. He also
classified animals according to their body plan
(as vertebrates, mollusks, those with jointed
exoskeletons and those with radial symmetry).
His studies about fossils gave rise to the science
of paleontology.

6. James Hutton (1726-1797) - His Theory on
Gradualism made a significant contribution to
the understanding of the geological processes that
shaped the Earth. He recognized that the Earth
was extremely old and noticed that there was no
need for global catastrophes to shape the surface
of the Earth. He also hypothesized that
gradualism is an ongoing process of erosion,
sedimentation and some other geological features
of the soil.

7. Charles Lyell (1797- 1875) - He travelled
widely in Europe, where he observed ancient
raised seabed’s separated by lava flows, and
became convinced that Hutton's model of
gradual geological change was correct. He
collected a large amount of supporting evidence
for uniformitarianism and set this out in the
"Principles of Geology", a book that had a
tremendous influence on Darwin’s work about
evolution.

8. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) – known as the
Father of Heredity, was carrying out
imperative experiments on dominant and
recessive traits of genes that proved Darwin’s
concept of natural selection. He wrote about
crossbreeding peas which established how
heredity works. His experiment on pea plants
showed those organisms which inherit
dominant genes were more likely described the
fittest organism over organism which inherit
recessive trait.

9. Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1774–1829) - His Theory of Use
and Disuse and Theory of Acquired Traits gave emphases in
the development of the theory of evolution.
• Theory of Use and Disuse hypothesized that organism can
reshape or alter its traits depending on the importance of
those traits to the
organisms.
• Theory of Acquired Traits hypothesized that acquired traits of
an organism that were adaptive to the environment can be
passed on to its offspring as inherited traits.

10. Charles Darwin (1809-1882) - famous for his Theory of
Evolution by Natural Selection. Together with Alfred Russel
Wallace, he describes how species evolved by Natural Selection:
• through artificial selection some offspring have variations
that occur by chance and that can be inherited.
• through Natural selection, fitness is a characteristic for an
organism’s relative ability to survive and produce fertile
offspring. Nature selects the variations that are most functional.
• speciation occurs when the selection, artificial or natural,
change domestic species over time.
• through Common descent, species no matter how diverse
shared common ancestry.

11. Darwin and Jean Baptiste de Lamarck both agreed that life evolved
from fewer, less complicated organisms to several, additional
complicated organisms. Moreover, each thought that life had modified
step by step over time and was still dynamical, that living things
amendment to be higher suited and tailored to their environments,
which all organisms are connected.

12. THAT’S ALL.
THANK YOU FOR LISTENING, GOD BLESS!