Anthropology, 210 (Pre-Darwin View of Natural Theory)

Much of the driving force behind man is to understand and define how and why they exist. Many have tried to answer this question, ranging from the spiritual to the literal in reason, often trying to find a compromise between the two schools of thought. The spiritual quest began with the Zoronastrians of the Persians, monotheistic worshipers who questioned why they existed were the precursors for Judeo-Christian religions that would shape the field of science. The religious perspective thought the world was fresh and would end soon. There were varying views on the natural order of humans, flora, and fauna.

The Greeks believed the world was old and unending. They followed a philosophy developed by Plato called essentialism, believing that each species had specific traits which all members of that species would share and define them. In contrast, Aristotle believed that traits could overlap between species, not making them the same but showing a close relation between the two. He arranged organisms from most primitive to most advanced, based on how much they deviated from what they viewed as the divine ideal. This process, called the Great Chain of Being, expressed how all organisms were connected and was the framework for modern biological taxonomy, or classification.

Carolus Linnaeus was a Swedish botanist who expanded taxonomy from his predecessors, he viewed his work as a documentation of the order of life as created by God. This system did not account for changes or evolutions amongst species members for during this time in Europe, the mid 1700s, as the traditional view followed essentialist requirements for species classification and that no new species could exist as all species were created by God all at once.

In the early 1800s catastrophism was a theory to understand the abrupt disappearance and emergence of different species via natural disasters such as floods, earthquakes, or acts of God. This theory conformed to the traditional view, but caused issue by suggesting new species could be created. The same theorist, Cuvier, also suggested that not all organisms were in a succession of hierarchy, but actually in four separate groups with each group being unconnected to the other. These theories eventually lead to uniformtarianism, which allowed for change but argued that change was part of God's plan.

Inconsistencies continued to rise leading into the 1900s, many scientists including George Louis Leclerc, Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck tried to link together the information eventually leading to transformational evolution. The basics of transformational evolution was an organism's ability to adapt to a changing environment. The key was an individual's ability to change instead of an entire species becoming something new. Lamarck hypothesised that an organ becomes stronger with use and weakens by disuse, and that this trait would be inherited by offspring. This would eventually be debunked, but opened the door for Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.