The Holy and the Heretical:

1
The Holy and the Heretical Early Views on
Fossils and Evolution
2
Thoughts on Fossils and Earth
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.)
Mystic forces produced images (resembling living
things) in stone
3
Chinese texts c. 300 AD
Dragons or Dinosaurs ?
Cyclops or Elephant ?
4
More misidentified fossils
falling stars Actually 1. belemnite guards
(internal skeleton of squid-like animal) And 2.
Segments of crinoid (sea lily) stems
5

Great Chain of Being
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
6
Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)
Remains of living things could have originally
been deposited in soft sediment that dried out
and hardened
7
Archbishop James 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 BC Ark
came to rest on Mt.Ararat on Wednesday, 5 May
2348 BC
8
Danish physician Nicholas Steno (1638-1686)

• Fossils are remains of once-living things !
• Law of Superposition
• Principle of Original Horizontality
• Principle of Lateral Continuity

9
Scrotum humanum petrified..uhhhhbody part of a
giant human
10
Remains of a sinner drowned In the great flood
(Skeleton of giant salamander)
11
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)

12
Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)
Father of Taxonomy
In Systema Naturae, classified fossils as
organic species
13
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

14
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

15
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)

16
Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Monet, Chevalier de
Lamarck (1744-1829)
Inheritance of Acquired Characters Basic 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.
17
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
18
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.
19
End of Lecture