BUENAVENTURA, KRYZLER KAYE M.

12-STEM 1

From the Origin of Life to Evolutionary School of Thought

ACTIVITY:
Complete the table below to summarize the history of the theory of evolution from pre-1800s to present. The
timeline is already provided; write only one key concept involved on each box. You may utilize other reference for this
activity.

Pre-1800s Evolutionary thought of:

Andreas Vesalius on comparative anatomy
Nicholas Steno on Paleontology
Carolus Linnaeus on nomenclature and classification
Period: 1800s-1900
Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) was a physician and
anatomist who lived during the 16th century AD, a time
when the standard authority on anatomy was the work of
Galen, an ancient Greek physician. Vesalius was known
for correcting numerous fallacies on Galen’s anatomical
knowledge through repeated and comparative
dissections of the human body. For instance, he found
that the lower jaw of humans was only one piece of
bone, not two; that there were no holes in the septum of
the heart; that the human breastbone has three
segments, not seven, all as opposed to Galen’s claims.
The mistakes, as Vesalius noticed, was because many of
Galen's observations were not even based on actual
humans as he had never dissected one before, and
instead were based on animals such as apes, monkeys,
and oxen. Vesalius' discovery of the important differences
between species marked the start of a new phase in the
study of human anatomy and had helped pilot the
science of comparative anatomy, in which researchers
studied animals to find their similarities and differences.
The birth of paleontology was considered to be on the
day in 1666 when Nicholas Steno (1638-1686) noticed a
strong resemblance between shark teeth and triangular
stony objects found within rock formations called
“tongue stones”. He concluded that tongue stones were
once shark teeth in the mouth of sharks that were buried
in mud or sand which later became dry land, which led
him to the question of how solid objects could come to
be found inside another solid object. He proposed that all
rocks and minerals were originally fluid that had been
formed by successive deposition of horizontal layers, with
new layers forming on top of older ones. Steno also
realized that as the rocks formed, they could trap animal
remains, converting them into fossils and preserving
them deep within their layers. This is now referred to as
Steno’s Law of Superposition, his most famous
contribution to geology. Therefore, closely examining the
earth’s strata and fossils could provide a chronological
history of geological events.
After making botanical expeditions, Carolus Linnaeus
(1707-1778) became convinced that he could organize all
of life into a single artificial system, one that would be his
first step towards comprehending God’s design in nature,
and he started grouping species into a hierarchy of
increasingly general categories. Linnaeus was the first to
frame principles for defining natural genera and species
of organisms and develop a uniform system for classifying
and naming them, known as binomial nomenclature. It
consists of the two Latin names given to an organism, the
first being the name of the genus to which the organism
belongs, that is further divided into species which makes
up the second name.
Thomas Maltus on human population
Georges Cuvier on Extinction
Jean Baptiste Lamarck on evolution
Karl Ernst von Baer
Charles Lyell on uniformitarianism
1798, Thomas Malthus (1776-1834) wrote the book “An
Essay on the Principle of Population”, which explained his
Theory of Human Population Growth. His calculations and
theories state that the human population would increase
geometrically by factors of four, eight, or sixteen, while
the food supply and natural resources would only
increase arithmetically, which means that food
production will not be able to keep up with growth in the
human population. This would result in disease, famine,
war, and calamity if the population size was not kept
under control.
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was the first person to
propose extinction as fact. In his Essay on the Theory of
the Earth in 1813, Cuvier proposed that now-extinct
species had been wiped out by periodic catastrophic
flooding events. He arrived at this conclusion after
studying different fossils from elephants and other
mammals and finding out that they did not belong to any
species alive today. The fossil evidence led him to
propose that periodically, the Earth went through sudden
changes, each of which could wipe out a number of
species.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1774 – 1829) is often credited
with making the first large advance toward modern
evolutionary theory for being the first to propose a
mechanism by which the gradual change of species might
take place. His theory of evolution had two important
points: the Use and Disuse, stating that parts of the body
often used to cope with the environment become larger
and stronger, while unused ones deteriorate; and the
Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics, in which Lamarck
believed that traits changed or acquired over an
individual's lifetime could be passed down to its offspring.
Known as the founding father of embryology, Karl Ernst
von Baer (1792-1876) studied the embryonic
development of animals and formulated what became
known as Baer's Laws of Embryology. Von Baer proposed
four rules to explain the observed pattern of embryonic
development in different species, which are: 1) general
characteristics of the group to which an embryo belongs
develop before special characteristics; 2) general
structural relations are likewise formed before the most
specific appear; 3) the form of any given embryo does not
converge upon other definite forms, but separates itself
from them; and 4) the embryo of a higher animal form
never resembles the adult of another animal form, such
as one less evolved, but only its embryo.
Uniformitarianism is a theory based on the work of James
Hutton and made popular by Charles Lyell (1797-1875) in
the 19th century. This theory states that the forces and
processes observable at earth’s surface acted in the same
manner and with essentially the same intensity in the
past as they do in the present and that such uniformity is
sufficient to account for all geologic change. Charles Lyell
influenced Darwin so deeply that Darwin envisioned
evolution as a sort of biological uniformitarianism. In
which he argued that evolution took place from one
generation to the next before our very eyes but it worked
too slowly for us to perceive. Uniformitarianism is also
the first theory to predict deep time in western science,
which is the idea that Earth history is so deep that a
person can’t possibly conceive the amount of time that
has passed on planet earth. This further proved that the
earth could not be a few thousand years old, as believed

Gregor Mendel on Genetics
Charles Darwin on Natural selection
Ernst Haeckel on Embryology
Wallace and Wegener on Biogeography
by theologian scientists.
Johann Gregor Mendel (1822–1884), often called the
“father of genetics,” discovered the fundamental laws of
inheritance through his work on pea plants, forming the
very basis for the field of genetics. He discovered that
genes come in pairs and that traits were inherited as
distinct units. Mendel also tracked the segregation of
parental genes and their appearance in the offspring as
dominant or recessive traits.
The mechanism that Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
proposed for evolution is natural selection, the process
by which organisms change over time as a result of
changes in heritable physical or behavioral traits. Changes
that allow an organism to better adapt to its environment
will help it survive and reproduce, therefore becoming
more common in a population over time. Charles
Darwin’s works was influenced heavily by many people
and pre-existing concepts from past theorists, such as
Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory on evolution, Thomas
Malthus’ Principle of Population, Georges Cuvier’s theory
on extinction, and Charles Lyell’s uniformitarianism.
Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) was a strong proponent of
Darwinism and applied evolutionary theories to
embryology as he proposed the biogenetic law after
reading Charles Darwin's theories in The Origin of
Species. The law theorizes that the stages an animal
embryo undergoes during development are a
chronological replay of that species' past evolutionary
forms, or simply that each embryo's developmental stage
represents an adult form of an evolutionary ancestor.
This evidence from embryology supported the theory
that all of species on Earth share a common ancestor, and
that by studying the stages of embryological
development, one is, in effect, studying the history and
diversification of life on Earth. However, although
Haeckel cited Darwin as he proposed the biogenetic law,
the two disagreed about embryology and evolution:
Haeckel interpreted the process of evolution as
progressive, following a specified path from lower to
higher animals, contrary to Darwin’s belief that evolution
wasn't progressive. Haeckel also endorsed Jean Baptiste
Lamarck's theory of acquired characters that competed
with Darwin's natural selection as the mechanism for
evolution; in the end, Haeckel incorporated both theories
into the biogenetic law.
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) had already accepted
evolution when he began his travels in 1848 through the
Amazon and Southeast Asia, and he sought to
demonstrate that it took place by showing how
geography affected the ranges of species. On his
journeys, he was struck by discoveries like how rivers and
mountain ranges marked the boundaries of many species'
ranges. Wallace came to much the same conclusion as
Darwin, that biogeography was simply a record of
inheritance: as species colonized new habitats and their
old ranges were divided by mountain ranges or other
barriers, they took on the distributions they have today.
Moving on to the 20th century, scientists have recognized
that biogeography has been far more dynamic over the
course of life's history. In 1912, Alfred Wegener (1880-
1930) was struck by the fact that identical fossil plants
and animals had been discovered on opposite sides of the
Atlantic. Since the ocean was too far for them to have
traversed on their own, Wegener proposed that the

Thomas Morgan on modern genetics
1920-1940 population genetics and modern evolutionary
synthesis
Ernst Mayr on Speciation
Francis Crick and James Watson on DNA structure
1970-2000: Evolutionary paths, horizontal gene transfer,
endosymbiosis, and developmental biology
continents had once been connected. He introduced the
Theory of Continental Drift, though it was not widely
accepted until the 1960s. The theory explained how
continents were formerly joined together in one large
landmass, Pangea, and slowly drifted apart due to the
movement of the plates below Earth's surface. This
revolutionized the way that everyone thought about
species and their distribution around the globe.
Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) played a key role in
initiating the field of experimental genetics. He began to
breed and conduct experiments with the common fruit
fly, Drosophila melanogaster, by which he established the
chromosome theory of heredity. Morgan confirmed
Mendelian laws of inheritance by showing that genes are
responsible for identifiable, hereditary traits, and
demonstrated the hypothesis that genes are linked in a
series and are located on chromosomes.
The modern synthesis was the early 20th-century
synthesis that describes the fusion of Charles Darwin's
theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on
heredity in a joint mathematical framework. The 19th
century ideas of natural selection and Mendelian genetics
were put together with population genetics, early in the
twentieth century. Population genetics is a field of
biology that studies the genetic composition of biological
populations, and the changes in genetic composition that
result from the operation of various factors namely
natural selection, mutation, random genetic drift, and
migration into or out of the population.
Ernst Mayr (1904-2005) helped define the modern
synthesis of evolutionary theory, proposing the
"Biological Species Concept." In particular, his work on
species and speciation helped scientists understand the
progress and mechanisms of evolution from one species
to another, and the importance of the species unit as
"the keystone of evolution." Ironically, one great
unsolved problem in Darwin's master work, On the Origin
of Species, was just the question on how and why species
originate. Mayr proposed that when a population of
organisms becomes separated from the main group by
time or geography, they eventually evolve different traits
and can no longer interbreed. According to him, it's this
isolation or separation that creates new species, and the
development of many new species is what leads to
evolutionary progress.
In 1953, Francis Crick (1916-2004) and James Watson
(1928-) announced that they have discovered the
chemical structure of the DNA, the molecule containing
human genes. The structure of DNA, as represented in
Watson and Crick's model, is a double-stranded,
antiparallel, right-handed helix. The sugar-phosphate
backbones of the DNA strands make up the outside of the
helix, while the nitrogenous bases are found on the inside
and form hydrogen-bonded pairs that hold the DNA
strands together. They also found that the DNA
replicated itself by separating into individual strands,
each of which became the template for a new double
helix. This marked a milestone in the history of science
and gave rise to modern molecular biology, which is
largely concerned with understanding how genes control
the chemical processes within cells.
One important development in the study of microbial
evolution came with the discovery in Japan in 1959 of

21st Century: Macro-, micro-evolution and Epigenetic
inheritance
horizontal gene transfer, which is the introduction of
genetic material from one species to another species by
mechanisms other than the vertical transmission from
parent/s to offspring. The endosymbiotic theory for the
origin of organelles sees a form of horizontal gene
transfer as a critical step in the evolution of eukaryotes
such as fungi, plants, and animals; it states that
organelles within the cells of eukaryotes such as
mitochondria and chloroplasts, had descended from
independent bacteria that came to live symbiotically
within other cells.
Epigenetics is the study of heritable changes in gene
expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms
other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence. By
the first decade of the 21st century, it had become
accepted that epigenetic mechanisms were a necessary
part of the evolutionary origin of cellular differentiation,
and that epigenetic variations can affect the production
of genetic changes, leading to both micro- and macro-
evolutionary changes. Microevolution happens on a small
scale and is the change in allele frequencies that occurs
over time within a single population, while
macroevolution happens on a scale that transcends the
boundaries of a single species. Within the modern
synthesis of the early 20th century, macroevolution is
thought of as the compounded effects of microevolution;
thus, the distinction between micro- and macroevolution
is not a fundamental one, and the only difference
between them is of time and scale.