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The Evolutionary Chain

|[The Evolutionary Chain] |
| Darwin’s contribution to science was pivotal to understanding evolution and its role but the history of evolutionary thinking illuminates the nature of science |
|well beyond Darwin’s contribution. |

Contents
Introduction 3
Pre 1800’s 3
Observations and Natural Theology – William Paley 3
Fossils and the birth of Paleontology – Nicholas Steno 4
The Order of Nature – Carolus Linnaeus 5
Old earth, Ancient Life – Leclerc, Buffon 6
Human Populations – Thomas Malthus 7
1800’s 7
Early Concepts of Evolution - Jean Baptiste Lamarck 7
Developmental Similarities - Karl von Baer 8
Biostratigraphy - William Smith 9
Uniformitarianism - Charles Lyell 9
Discrete Genes Are Inherited - Gregor Mendel 10
Natural Selection - Charles Darwin & Alfred Russell Wallace 11
Early Evolution and Development - Ernst Haeckel 11
Biogeography - Wallace and Wegener 12
Fossil Hominids, Human Evolution - Thomas Huxley & Eugene Dubois 13
Chromosomes, Mutation, and the Birth of Modern Genetics - Thomas Hunt Morgan 13
1900 to Present 14
Random Mutations and Evolutionary Change - Ronald Fisher, JBS Haldane, & Sewall Wright 14
Starting "The Modern Synthesis" - Theodosius Dobzhansky 15
Speciation - Ernst Mayr 15
DNA, the Language of Evolution - Francis Crick & James Watson 16
Evolution and Development for the 21st Century - Stephen Jay Gould 17
Summary 18
Bibliography 18

Introduction

The scope of this paper is to introduce the reader from a global perspective, since the 18th century, how the study of four fields- earth's history, life's history, and mechanisms of evolution, development and genetics has contributed to our current understanding of evolution. The theory of...