Nested Hierarchies the Order of Nature Carolus Linnaeus

Nested Hierarchies, the Order of Nature: Carolus Linnaeus • Swedish Naturalist • Influenced by Aristotle’s “Great Chain of Being” • Linnaeus’ Artificial System of Classification • “All for the Glory of Go. D”

Nested Hierarchies, the Order of Nature: Carolus Linnaeus • Systema Naturae (1735) • Polynomial Name to Binomial Name (Genus specific epithet) • Species-Genus-Family-Order. Class- Division/Phylum-Kingdom

The Ecology of Human Populations: Thomas Malthus • Population Growth vs. Food Supply • An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society(1798) Between 1800 and 2000 the human population increased about six-fold. Has the food supply kept pace? Will there be enough food to support the projected population of 9. 2 billion in 2050?

Early Concepts of Evolution: Jean Baptiste Lamarck • French Naturalist • Species changed over time into new species via natural processes • Lamarckian Theory of Evolution: Theory of Use and Disuse and Theory of Acquired Inheritance Ladder Type Evolution

Extinctions & Paleontology: Georges Cuvier • Catastrophist • Fossils became popular • “Some species had actually vanished from the face of the earth”, and so EXTINCTION • Cuvier was a legendary anatomist • Mass extinction

Uniformitarianism: Charles Lyell • Gradualism(James Hutton )+ added ideas= uniformitarianism • Geological processes operating in the past are still operational today! • The Earth is old!

Discrete Genes Are Inherited: Gregor Mendel • Science of Heredity using garden peas • 22 pea varieties using 7 character traits • Blending inheritance vs. laws of heredity • Mendel’s work goes unrecognized even Darwin himself • 15 years have to wait before scientists realized the answer to one of life’s greatest mysteries! • “Father of Genetics”

Natural Selection: Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace • The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life” (1859) • First Synthetic Theory of Evolution • Pressure of population growth by Malthus is applicable to other organisms

Natural Selection: Charles Darwin & Alfred Russel Wallace Darwin’s Finches • Selection of Traits: key to survival in all struggling organisms in a finite environment • Wallace and Darwin maintained correspondence • A joint paper was published at the Linnaean Society of London • Darwin and Wallace developed similar theory, but Darwin amassed more evidences and published a book.

Rediscovering the Laws of Heredity: de Vries, Correns, and Tschermak De Vries Tschermak Correns

DNA, the Language of Evolution: Francis Crick & James Watson Francis Crick • Life was encoded in GENES • DNA structure was inferred from a top view X-ray • Life’s Cookbook • Mutation as the raw material of EVOLUTION was well understood with the dawn of the DNA molecule

Reference: • Understanding Evolution. University of California Museum of Paleontology