The Evolution Timeline

  • Period: 427 BCE to 347 BCE

    ideal form

    Plato proposed that each object on Earth is merely a temporary reflection of its divinely inspired "ideal form"
  • Period: 384 BCE to 322 BCE

    Ladder of Nature

    Plato's student aristotle categorized all organisms into a linear hierarchy that called the "Ladder of Nature"
  • Period: to

    Georges Louis Leclerc

    Georges Louis Leclerc suggested that the original creation provided a relatively small number of founding species
  • Period: to

    Lyell

    Lyell considered the forces of wind, water,and volcanoes and concluded that there was no need to invoke catastrophes to explain the findings of geology
  • Period: to

    Jean Baptiste Lamarck

    Jean Baptiste Lamarck propose a mechanism for evolution
  • Period: to

    William Smith

    William Smith recognized that certain fossils were always found in the same layers of rock
  • Period: to

    Georges Cuvier

    Georges Cuvier advanced the idea of catastrophism
  • Period: to

    Cuvier

    Cuvier's hypothesis of a world shaped by successive catastrophes was challenged by the work of the geologist Charles Lyell
  • Lamarck

    Lamarck published a book in wich he hypothesized that organism evolved through yhe inheritance of acquired characteristics
  • Darwin

    Darwin was the first to propose a mechanism for evolution