history of evolution

• Traditional Judaism and Christianity


  Explain the origin of living beings and their adaptations to their environments as the handiwork of an omniscient God
• Anaximander


  • Proposed that animals could be transformed from one kind into another
• Empedocles


  • Speculated that living beings were made up of various combinations of preexisting parts
  • The first living beings were some type of disembodied organs, which through the ongoing process of attraction and repulsion, evolved into the creatures we observe today
• Charles Darwin


  • The father of modern theory of evolution
  • Discovered the numerous species of finches in the Galapagos Islands
  • In 1859 he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
• Darwin's theory


  • Accepted the facts of adaptation
  • Showed that the multiplicity of plants and animals, with their exquisite and varied adaptations, could be explained by a process of natural selection, without recourse to a Creator or any designer agent
• Alfred Russel Wallace


  • A naturalist, geographer, and social critic
  • By 1855, his observations led him to the conclusion that living things change over long periods of time—they evolve
• Gregor Mendel


  • Austrian monk, plant breeder
  • Devised experiments cross-breeding pea plants with purple and white flowers, examining about 28,000 plants
  • His theory (Mendel's Theory of Heredity) accounts for biological inheritance through particulate factors (now known as genes) inherited one from each parent, which do not mix or blend but segregate in the formation of the sex cells, or gametes
  • He found that the plants' offspring retained traits of the parents
• Hugo De Vries


  • In early 1900's, through observations of new forms of flower species, he introduced the concept of mutations
  • Proposed the new theory of evolution known as Mutationism
  • Mutation Theory stated that "mutations are the ultimate source of variation"
  • Recognized that organisms of different species still share a common phenotype
  • It was later indicated that recombination during sexual reproduction and migration are also important factors
• James Watson and Francis Crick


  • In 1953 they deduced the molecular structure of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), the hereditary material contained in the chromosomes of every cell's nucleus
  • Discovered the structure of DNA, the chemical that encodes instructions for building and replicating almost all living things
  • This information determines the sequence of amino acid building blocks of protein molecules, which include, among others, structural proteins such as collagen, respiratory proteins such as hemoglobin, and numerous enzymes responsible for the organism's fundamental life processes
  • Genetic information contained in the DNA can thus be investigated by examining the sequences of amino acids in the proteins
  • The laboratory techniques of DNA cloning and sequencing have provided a new and powerful means of investigating evolution at the molecular level