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Stephen Jay Gould (/ ɡ uː l d / GOOLD; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science.He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. [1]
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept ...
The paleoanthropologist Trenton Holliday states that "Darwin is rightly considered to be the preeminent evolutionary scientist of all time". [ 223 ] By around 1880, most scientists were convinced of evolution as descent with modification, though few agreed with Darwin that natural selection "has been the main but not the exclusive means of ...
Although he was not the first thinker to advocate organic evolution, he was the first to develop a truly coherent evolutionary theory. [10] He outlined his theories regarding evolution first in his Floreal lecture of 1800, and then in three later published works: Recherches sur l'organisation des corps vivants, 1802. Philosophie zoologique, 1809.
The level of support for evolution among scientists, the public, and other groups is a topic that frequently arises in the creation–evolution controversy, and touches on educational, religious, philosophical, scientific, and political issues.
The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies.
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Cuvier's theory on extinction has met opposition from other notable natural scientists like Darwin and Charles Lyell. Unlike Cuvier, they didn't believe that extinction was a sudden process; they believed that like the Earth, animals collectively undergo gradual change as a species.