The Holy and the Heretical:

Early Views on Fossils and Evolution

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)

Mystic forces produced images (resembling living things) in stone

Thoughts on Fossils and Earth

Chinese texts c. 300 AD

Dragons or Dinosaurs ?

Cyclops or Elephant ?

“falling stars”

Actually: 1. belemnite guards (internal skeleton of squid-like animal) And2. Segments of crinoid (“sea lily”) stems

More misidentified fossils

Out of classical Greek philosophy (with modifications made by Christian thinkers) came the concept of the “Great Chain of Being,” which featured the non-living entities and “lowest” life forms at the bottom and God at the top

Great Chain of Being

Leonardo Da Vinci(1452-1519)

Remains of living things could have originally been deposited in soft sediment

that dried out and hardened

ArchbishopJames Ussher (1581-1656)

Based on number of generations calculated from Holy Bible, added to years of modern recorded history, Ussher declared that God began to create the Earth on Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC and completed His ambitious project by Saturday, October 29 , 4004 BC More:Adam and Eve cast out of the Garden on Monday, Nov. 10, 4004 BCArk came to rest on Mt.Ararat on Wednesday, 5 May 2348 BC

Danish physicianNicholas Steno (1638-1686)

Fossils are remains of once-living things !

• Law of Superposition• Principle of Original Horizontality

• Principle of Lateral Continuity

Scrotum humanum:petrified..uhhhh…body part

of a giant human

“Remains of a sinner drowned In the great flood”

(Skeleton of giant salamander)

Robert Hooke (1635-1703)

• Recognition of “cells” in fossilized wood• Limited vertical range of certain fossils

(some fossil organisms are not living today

so must have gone extinct)

Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)

“Father of Taxonomy”

In “Systema Naturae,” classified fossils as organic species

George-Louis Leclerc, Count of Buffon(1707-1788)

• Based on cooling rate of iron balls, calculated that It took 75,000 years for Earth to cool to present state (Earth is older than once thought).• “Great chain of being” a still popular concept for the time• Believed in change of organisms through time but could not provide a sound mechanism to explain it

James Hutton (1726-1797)

Principle of Uniformitarianism(the present is the key to the past)

• Earth is VERY old !“we find no vestige of a beginning, and no

prospect of an end”

Baron Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

• Fossils can be compared to living things, and can be classified in the same groups• Proponent of catastrophism (geological changes occur in large, brief “revolutions”)• Introduced concept of extinction (and concept that species that went extinct were replaced by new ones)

Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Monet,Chevalier de Lamarck

(1744-1829)

Inheritance of Acquired CharactersBasic idea: All evolutionary change is the sum of small changes, over many generations, that developed during lifetimes of individual organisms. These changes are imposed by changing environmental conditions or needs of the particular organism.

An example of how Lamarck viewed the process of evolution:

Lamarck believed that the long necks of giraffes evolved as generations of giraffes reached for ever higher leaves.

He believed members of each generation, experienced lengthening of the neck by this stretching, and passed this trait to the next generation

William Smith (1769-1839)

Principle of Faunal Succession(distinct pattern to order of fossils in strata)

Worked as a surveyor during construction of canal system in England

Established a means of determining the relative ages of strata by the fossils they contain.

End of Lecture