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Carolus Linnaeus
Carolus Linnaeus, also called Carl Linnaeus, Swedish Carl von Linné (born May 23, 1707, Råshult, Småland, Sweden—died January 10, 1778, Uppsala), Swedish naturalist and explorer who was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature). -
James Hutton
Hutton pictured a cycle in which rocks were eroded into small particles and carried eventually to the sea. There they would gradually be buried ever more deeply under more eroded material. The heat of the earth would then fuse the small particles back into solid rock and later lift the rock back to the surface. Then the cycle would begin again. -
Jean Baptiste Lamarck
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, in full Jean-Baptiste-Pierre-Antoine de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck (born August 1, 1744, Bazentin-le-Petit, Picardy, France—died December 18, 1829, Paris), pioneer French biologist who is best known for his idea that acquired characters are inheritable, an idea known as Lamarckism, which is controverted by modern genetics and evolutionary theory. -
Georges Cuvier
Georges Cuvier, in full Georges-Léopold-Chrétien-Frédéric-Dagobert, Baron Cuvier (born August 23, 1769, Montbéliard [now in France]—died May 13, 1832, Paris, France), French zoologist and statesman, who established the sciences of comparative anatomy and paleontology. -
Sir Charles Lyell
Scottish geologist largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that all features of the Earth’s surface are produced by physical, chemical, and biological processes through long periods of geological time. The concept was called uniformitarianism (initially set forth by James Hutton). Lyell’s achievements laid the foundations for evolutionary biology as well as for an understanding of the Earth’s development. He was knighted in 1848 and made a baronet in 1864. -
Charles Darwin
English naturalist whose scientific theory of evolution by natural selection became the foundation of modern evolutionary studies. -
Alfred Russell Wallace
His formulation of the theory of evolution by natural selection, which predated Charles Darwin’s published contributions, is his most outstanding legacy, but it was just one of many controversial issues he studied and wrote about during his lifetime. Wallace’s wide-ranging interests—from socialism to spiritualism, from island biogeography to life on Mars, from evolution to land nationalization—stemmed from his profound concern with the moral, social, and political values of human life.
