Influential Biologists Before Darwin

Though Darwin was the first to come out with evolution by natural selection when he published On the Origin of Species, he was not the first influential biologist. Much work was done in biology before Darwin, and these are some of the most important thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

The first major pre-Darwinian thinker was Carolus Linneaus, who lived from 1707 to 1778. Linneaus was the first to introduce the concept of taxonomy, which is the classification of animals by observable characteristics. He was also the first to employ racial taxonomy for humans. What Linneaus did was particularly amazing. He possessed a significant source of wealth which allowed him to collect large amounts of specimens. Of course, it is a myth that Linneaus was an evolutionist - he believed he was classifying God's creatures, and had a static view of nature, meaning that he figured that nature was always how it was in his time. However, this myth arose simply because Linneaus classified the world's many species completely accurately, almost insinuating that he knew about evolution.

After Linneaus, there was a man by the name of Comte de Buffon who lived from 1707 to 1788. He was the first to pioneer the idea of natural selection, claiming that nature was not static. Rather, he held that nature changed over time. Indeed, he was a revolutionary naturalist, and influenced both Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck lived from 1744 to 1829. Like Buffon, Lamarck believed that nature was non-static and thus contradicted the traditional biblical idea that nature was the same since it was created by God. Lamarck was particularly influential in his idea that animals had "acquired traits" that they received through their parents and passed on through their offspring. This also included such traits acquired during the lifetime of the animal, which his particularly important because it hinted at what we now know as genetic mutations.