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Nicolas Steno
Proposed that fossils were in fact living creatures and didn't grow in the ground -
Georges-Louis Buffon
Built on the works of Steno and coined the idea of "lost species", which was used by Darwin -
Thomas Robert Mathus
Hypothesized that human population would overproduce if things like natural disaster and famine didn't happen -
Georges Cuvier
Didn't believe in evolution, but he helped Darwin by confirming that species had gone extinct in the past. -
Jean-Baptiste Lamarcke
Published 2 ideas that made a big impact on evolution theory going forward. The first was that organism's most used organs and tissues under hypertrophy and further develop. The 2nd was that the organs and tissues that underwent hypertrophy would be inherited by the next generation. -
Charles Lyell
Popularized the uniformitarianism theory, which said that Earth had been evolving through gradual changes -
Gregor Mendel
Is considered the father of modern genetics and did many experiments with things like peas that showed that crossbreeding of organisms could lead to desirable traits. -
Charles Darwin
Developed Darwinism. Darwinism stated that species of organisms come about because of natural selection of small variations, that increase the organism's ability to survive and reproduce -
Thomas Morgan Etc
Established the first chromosomal theory of heredity based off of work he had done with fruit flies in the past that was helped by the breakthrough of Mendelian inheritance -
Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould
Proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which proposes that once a species appears in a fossil record, the population will stabilize.
