5-1-1 Evolution Part 1, Pre-Renaissance Thought Flashcards
In ancient Greece and Rome, science was done mainly by observation rather than by experimentation. From their observations, what did the Greek and Roman philosophers propose about the origin of life?
Anaximander (Greek):
Living things arose from moisture. Fish were among the earliest living things, and humans developed from them.
Aristotle (Greek):
Nature advances from non-living matter to plants to lower animals to higher animals to human. He called this ordered pattern the “Scala Naturae” or “Ladder of Life”.
Lucretious (Roman):
Living things change over time. The weaker, slower, less clever die out because they can not compete.
In the Middle Ages (~500 - 1400 CE), ideas and beliefs about the history of earth and its humans came from what source?
The Bible
In the mid-1600’s, an archbishop created a chronology of humankind based on the Bible. The chronology became part of his piece “History of the World”, which was accepted by many. According to him, when was Earth formed? How long ago? What was his name?
4004 B.C.
(6000 years ago)
Ussher
Despite the Bibles’ influence in the middle ages, by the late 1400s, some geologists doubted the “truth” of a 5,000-year old Earth. What were some findings that indicated that the earth is much older? Who were they?
In the late 1400s, Leonardo da Vinci calculated the rate at which sediments built up in the Po River of Italy and concluded that it took 200,000 years to form some nearby rock deposits.
Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) studied fossils and concluded that the Earth had to be older than previously thought.
What idea about the Earth did James Hutton develop in the 1700s?
The idea that Earth was constantly forming, and that the same changes that shaped Earth in the past continued to do so today. Many of the Earth’s features could not be explained if it were only a few thousand years old.
Who refined James Hutton’s idea? How?
Charles Lyell (1797-1895) proposed the idea of slow change over long period of time in his book “Principles of Geology”.
Charles Lyell’s (1797-1895) ideas of a slow changing Earth had profound influence on which English scientists?
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and Alred Russel Wallace (1823-1913)
