People

From Biol301

note the name....

first exam people

• Plato
  • Believed in two worlds, one of ideal perfection, the other being the real world of imperfection

• Aristotle
  • Believed everything fit on a ladder
  • Said everything had an essence

• Paley
  • Suggested Natural Theology which said that we can discover the nature of the creator by discovering the creation around us

• Kant
  • Leading figure in the early phase of the Age of Enlightenment
  • Suggested that planets from naturally from the accretion of clouds of 'space-dust'

• Linnaeus
  • Came up with binomial naming protocol
  • Set up an hierarchy (gave group idea to C. Darwin)
  • Believed species were fixed

• Hutton
  • Saw Hadrian wall and realized Earth isn't 6k years old
  • Suggested that aging mechanisms are the same now as they were in the beginning
  • Suggested that over a large period of time (gradualism) these forces could make the things we see today

• Lyell
  • Uniformitarianism (including gradualism)
  • Suggested there has been no change in rate of Earth-changing forces
  • Wrote Principles of Geography which proved to C. Darwin on the Beagle that the Earth is not 6k years old

• Cuvier
  • Started paleontology
  • Recognized extinction
  • Explained soil layers by catastrophism
  • Anti-evolutionist
  • Disproved Hutton's infinite time theory by demonstrating different fossils in different rock levels

• Jefferson
  • Believed Lyell's thought that extinction was just an illusion so he sent out Lewis and Clark

• Hilaire (1800s)
  • Suggested that acquired traits could be passed on

• E. Darwin
  • One of several who suggested that animals evolved because of chaning environments

• Lamarck
  • First real evolution theory
  • Two mechanisms: use/disuse and inheritance of acquired traits
  • Did not believe in extinction; they just evolved into something else
  • Believed things were getting more complex, becoming perfect
  • Instinctual drive (orthogenesis)

• Maltthus
  • Showed that because populations grow exponentially in size they always accumulate beyond what is possible for the world to sustain
  • Wrote book on human population which revealed to C. Darwin the importance of competition in Natural Selection

• Wallace
  • Cooler than C. Darwin

• Fisher
  • Used population genetics to point out that sex ratios would stabilize at half or cycle back and forth because of selection by sex frequency

• Weismann
  • Cut tails off of 22 generations of mice to show that inherited traits are not passed down

• Goldschmidt
  • Credited with the Hopeful Monsters theory of macroevolution

• Jenkin
  • Pointed out that natural selection with blending would lead to homology in an population

• Haeckel
  • Suggested that each organism replayed it's evolutionary pathway in the embryological pathway (ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny)
  • Orthogenesis is inherent in Haeckel's theories

• Mendel
  • Demonstrated why inheritance works the way it does

• C. Darwin
  • Challenged the idea that every organism had its spot on a ladder
  • First to lay out mechanism for evolution with evidence: natural selection
  • Published Origin of Species in 1859

• Richard Dawkins
  • Wrote The Blind Watchmaker which noted that natural selection would make weird, ill-logic designs because it could not see ahead.

second exam people

• Kettlewell and Ford
  • Did experiment with Biston betularia. They released counted number of these moths; some were dark and some were light. In the sooty forest, they saw that the light colored moths were successfully spotted by birds more often and eaten more frequently.

• Fisher (1932)
  • Came up with the theory that sexual reproduction is selected for in larger animals because the exchange of genetic material helps to increase variation levels. This increase in variation is necessary to combat the more-frequently-evolving parasites attacking larger animals. (The parasites are evolving more quickly because they have shorter reproduction cycles.)
  • Came up with the microscope explanation for evolutionary gradualism which compares evolution to proper focusing techniques on a microscope: make a small change and analyze --if the change was good continue on, if it was bad, stop and try the other direction.

• G.C. Williams
  • Pointed out there must be a short term advantage to sexual reproduction, otherwise an organism with even a slight advantage would turn asexual and quickly become the most prevalent in the entire population.
  • In reply to his argument, he suggests Sibling competition: the idea that the parents producing the most varied (hence sexual reproduction) seeds are statistically more likely to survive.

• Hamilton
  • Verbalized the "Red Queen" theory (from Lewis Carroll's Alice through the Looking Glass) suggesting that sexual reproduction is some organisms mechanism for keeping up with the evolutionary pace of the parasites which attack them.

• Zahavi
  • Suggested a handicap principle: sexual ornamentation results from the ability to burn extra resources.

• Trivers
  • Came up with the unstable equilibrium model for the evolution of anisogamy: via a mutation one sex started to give more in terms of gametes and therefore had more reason to take care of the offspring. This perpetuated until we now have huge eggs in females and little bitty sperm in males.

• Sewell Wright (1932)
  • Proposed the adaptive landscape.

• Jacob
  • Said Evolution is a tinkerer to explain that the starting point of evolution matters because there are multiple peaks on most evolutionary landscapes.

• Wynne Edwards
  • One of several evolutionary thinkers who attempted to use group selection as the explanation for natural phenomenon.

• Richard Dawkins
  • Gave us the idea of replicators and vehicles
  • Is the man.
  • First proposed the idea of memes.

• Stanley Miller
  • Used the spark experiment to model early earth atmosphereic conditions to find out what would happen. He ended up seeing the spontaneous formation of amino acids!

• Tyler
  • Studied rocks on US / Canadian border and found microfossils.

• Motoo Kimuno
  • Suggested neutral mutations.

• Lewin and Hubby (1966)
  • Discovered protein polymorphism. This is the idea that throughout a population there will be many small mutations that result in slightly different proteins (although functionally the same).