ANTH 201 Full Course Notes

Sept 13th 9/13/2022




THE EVOLUTION OF OUR UNDERSTANDING
OF EVOLUTION: PART 2




Plato (400 BC) Darwin 1958




OVERVIEW OF THE IMPORTANT
CONCEPTS/IDEAS (CH 1)
 Great Chain of Being
 Geocentrism vs Heliocentrism
 How old is the Earth?
 Uniformitarianism vs Catastrophism
 Linneaus: Biological Classification of Living Things
 Do plants and animals change over time?
 Lamarck: Evolution by the Inheritance of Acquired
Characters
 Darwin: Evolution by Natural Selection




GREAT CHAIN OF BEING

 Longstanding view of the way
that the various life forms on
earth were organized
 Everything has its place in a
divinely planned hierarchy
 Purposeful order from simple
to complex; imperfect to
perfect
 Static ‐ Species are
fixed/immutable/unchanging
 Humans at the top




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, 9/13/2022




https://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2013/03/25/diachronic-
extrapolation-and-uniformitarianism/




EVOLUTION BY THE
INHERITANCE OF ACQUIRED CHARACTERS
 First theory of species
evolution (change over time)
WITH a mechanism for how
change could occur
 Proposed by Jean Baptiste
Lamarck (1744‐1829)
 Two important components:
 Acquired characters
 Inheritance of them




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