NATS 1760 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Carl Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, Binomial Nomenclature
18 Jun 2013
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Document Summary
Darwin came up with a mechanism to understand the evolutionary process, the idea that things evolve through time is a debating topic that came about and does not belong to darwin. Nats 1760- darwin and evolution: intellectual and scientific background prior to darwin, great chain of being. Great chain of being: dominated religious thinking; fixity of species. God created all species according to certain order. Highest place on chain: god, angels, man. Hierarchy stable and harmonious but there is a problem: difficult to explain idea of extinction; if. Single hierarchy stretching from man to simplest form of life something is fixed how can it not exist, goes against notion of stability. To reconcile idea, had to image chain not as a stable representation (fixed) but as a sequence that would gradually change over long period of time. Dimension of time introduced: debates in natural history and classification * study each natural philosopher according to the questions.
