Profile Views:
Monkeys
Interests:
Genetics
Finding evidence of evolution .
Archaeopteryx lithographica is an excellent intermediate fossil of bird like dinosaur. If it was not for the feather impressions it would have been classified as a dinosaur. This animal had teeth, a long bony tail, and claws on its forearms all traits that modern birds lack today.
I enjoy collecting specimens.
I had a fun time sailing around the world on the H.M.S. Beagle . My trip to the Galapagos influenced my theory of Evolution.
Here is a picture of the H.M.S. Beagle .
This picture shows the voyage of the Beagle .
This is a map of the Galapagos Islands .
Anyone who wants to enlighten religious fundamentalists.
This is a no bible banging zone but if you leave a religious comment I will not delete it as long as you do not delete my comments. Do not leave comments that automatically play music. I will delete them. If I wanted music to automatically play on my page I would do it myself. All videos, music that has to be clicked on to play, links to other pages and internet sites and pictures are always welcome along with all written comments.
I accept all adds. I don’t care what you believe or religion you are because we are all in the genus Homo .
I hope you enjoy my theory - Chuck
Pearl Jam - Do the Evolution
The Race for the Double Helix
This is a clip from Idiocracy.
This is my favorite bird book. If you like birds I reccomend this field book for bird identification.
Dawkins revolutionized biology by rethinking Natural Selection focusing on the gene level instead of the individual. This book should be read by every biologist or anyone who wants to learn more about biology.
I really enjoyed reading this book. Why should animals have sex? Explore the world of the Red Queen where species are evolving to counteract their parasites. Ridley also compared humans to our near ape ancestors.
Lucy
Australopithecus afarensis Until 1995, this species was the earliest known member of the Hominid family. Australopithecus afarensis lived from approximately 4 to 2.7 million years ago along the northern Rift valley of east Africa.
Aristotle (384 BC–322 BC) Student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. Aristotle and Plato are often considered as the two most influential philosophers in Western thought. He wrote many books about physics, poetry, zoology, logic, rhetoric, government, and biology.
Gaius or Caius Plinius Secundus (AD 23 –AD 79), better known as Pliny the Elder, was an ancient author, naturalist or natural philosopher and naval and military commander of some importance who wrote Naturalis Historia.
Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) was an Italian polymath; a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics.
Galileo Galilei (1564 –1642) was a Tuscan (Italian) physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the scientific revolution. His achievements include the first systematic studies of uniformly accelerated motion, improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations, and support for Copernicanism. Galileo's empirical work was a significant break from the abstract Aristotelian approach of his time. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy," the "father of modern physics," the "father of science," and “the Father of Modern Science.â€
Robert Hooke (1635-1703) He was one of the greatest experimental scientists of the seventeenth century playing an important role in the scientific revolution. Hooke coined the biological term cell -- so called because his observations of plant cells reminded him of monks' cells.
Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778) The father of modern Taxonomy. He came up with the naming system for living things we still use today.
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) He was a major 19th century French naturalist, who was one of the first to use the term biology in its modern sense. He is remembered today mainly in connection with a discredited theory of heredity, the "inheritance of acquired traits", but Charles Darwin and others acknowledged him as an early proponent of ideas about evolution.
Thomas Robert Malthus, FRS (1766 –1834), has become best-known for his influential views on population growth. He famously emphasized the potential for populations to rise steeply.
John James Audubon (1785–1851) He was an American ornithologist, naturalist, and painter. He painted, catalogued, and described the birds of North America.
John Stevens Henslow (1796-1861) was an English botanist and geologist. As a teacher both in the classroom and in the field he was eminently successful. He was a correspondent of John James Audubon who in 1929 named Henslow's Sparrow after him, and to Henslow, Darwin largely owed his attachment to natural history, and also his introduction to Captain Fitzroy of HMS Beagle. Henslow founded the Cambridge University Botanic Garden in 1831.
This is a Henslow’s Sparrow I banded.
Sir Charles Lyell, 1st Baronet, KT (1797–1875) was a Scottish lawyer, geologist, and populariser of uniformitarianism.
Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy (1805 –1865) achieved lasting fame as the captain of HMS Beagle during Charles Darwin's famous voyage, and as a pioneering meteorologist who made accurate weather forecasting a reality. He was an able surveyor and hydrographer and served as Governor of New Zealand from 1843 to 1845.
Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) was an English philosopher; prominent classical liberal political theorist; and sociological theorist. 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. He is best known for coining the phrase, "survival of the fittest," which he did in Principles of Biology (1864), after reading Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species.
Gregor Mendel (1822-1884) The father of modern Genetics. He was an Augustinian monk who bred pea plants and could predict the ratio of the offspring would inherit the traits. By breeding plants with dominant and recessive traits he could explain why some traits appear to skip a generation.
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) He was a French microbiologist and chemist. He is known to the general public for his demonstrations of the germ theory of disease and his development techniques of inoculation, most notably the first vaccine against rabies; however, he also made a major discovery in the field of chemistry, regarding asymmetric molecules and the polarization of light. He also is widely credited for ending spontaneous generation, allowing the field of microbiology to be created.
Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) - Another naturalist who developed the theory of natural selection the same time as Charles Darwin.
Thomas Henry Huxley PC, FRS (1825-1895) was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. Huxley's famous 1860 debate with the Lord Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated on whether man was closely related to apes. Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. He was instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, and fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.
John Muir (1838–1914) He was a Scottish-American polymath: environmentalist, naturalist, explorer, writer, inventor, engineer and geologist. He is, however, probably best remembered as one of the greatest champions of the Yosemite area's natural wonders.
George Romanes (1848- 1894) He was an English naturalist who was a pioneer of the field of comparative psychology and animal intelligence. Romanes was educated in medicine at the University of Combridge and was friends with Charles Darwin.
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849-1936) was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1904 for research pertaining to the digestive system. Pavlov is widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning.
Vito Volterra (1860-1940) was an Italian mathematician and physicist, best known for his contributions to mathematical biology.
Alfred James Lotka (1880-1949) was a US mathematician, physical chemist, and statistician famous for his work in population dynamics and energetics.
The Lotka-Volterra equations, also known as the predator-prey equations, are a pair of first order, non-linear, differential equations frequently used to describe the dynamics of biological systems in which two species interact, one a predator and one its prey. They were proposed independently by Alfred J. Lotka in 1925 and Vito Volterra in 1926.
George Washington Carver (1860-1943) He was an African American botanist who worked in agricultural extension in the Southern United States. He taught former slaves farming techniques for self-sufficiency and is known for suggesting hundreds of uses for the peanut and other plants to increase the profitability of farming.
Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) An American geneticist who worked on the natural history, zoology, and macromutation in the fruit fly Drosophila. His most important contributions to science were in genetics; he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for proving chromosomes to be the carriers of genes. Because of his work, Drosophila became one of the major model organisms in genetics.
Sergei Sergeevich Chetverikov (1880-1959) was one of founders of genetics in natural populations and hence a contributor to the synthetic theory of evolution . Some of his ideas have stood the test of time, and some have not: he was generally right about mutation and the importance of natural selection, but wrong about Polymorphism .
Karl Ritter von Frisch (1886 –1982) was an Austrian ethologist who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1973, along with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Konrad Lorenz. He studied the senses of bees, identified their mechanisms of communication and showed their sensitivity to ultraviolet and polarized light. In the center of his work were the study of the sensory perceptions of the honey bee and was one of the first who translated the meaning of the waggle dance.
Julian Huxley (1887-1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, humanist and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis . He was Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935-1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.
Sewall Wright (1889–1988) was an American geneticist known for his influential work on evolutionary theory and also for his work on path analysis. With R. A. Fisher and J.B.S. Haldane, he was a founder of theoretical population genetics . He is the discoverer of the inbreeding coefficient and of methods of computing it in pedigrees. He extended this work to populations, computing the amount of inbreeding of members of populations as a result of random genetic drift, and he and Fisher pioneered methods for computing the distribution of gene frequencies among populations as a result of the interaction of natural selection, mutation, migration and genetic drift. The work of Fisher, Wright, and Haldane on theoretical population genetics was a major step in the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis of genetics with evolution. Wright also made major contributions to mammalian genetics and biochemical genetics.
R A Fisher (1890–1962) was a British eugenicist, evolutionary biologist, geneticist and statistician. He created the foundations for modern statistical science.He also contributed to the development of the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Hermann Joseph Muller (1890–1967) was a Nobel Prize-winning American geneticist and educator, best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (X-ray mutagenesis) as well as his outspoken political beliefs. In evolutionary genetics, Muller's ratchet(named after him) is the name given to the process by which the genomes of an asexual population accumulate deleterious mutations in an irreversible manner. Muller proposed this mechanism as a theory to explain the evolution of sex.
J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964), known as Jack (but who used 'J.B.S.' in his printed works), was a British geneticist and evolutionary biologist. He was one of the founders (along with Ronald Fisher and Sewall Wright) of population genetics .
Alfred Charles Kinsey (1894-1956), was an American biologist and professor of entomology and zoology who in 1947 founded the Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction at Indiana University, now called the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. Kinsey's research on human sexuality profoundly influenced social and cultural values in the United States and many other countries.
Bernhard Rensch (1900-1990) was a German evolutionary biologist, and ornithologist who did field work in Indonesia and India. He is probably best known as one of the architects of the modern evolutionary synthesis. , which he popularized in Germany.
Hans Adolf Krebs (1900-1981) His area of interest was intermediary metabolism. He discovered the urea cycle in 1932 and the citric acid cycle in 1937, which is still often called Krebs cycle. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953
Theodore Dobzhansky (1900-1975) A noted geneticist and evolutionary biologist. His famous quote - "Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution." He also helped in developing the modern evolutionary synthesis.
Not this guy
The real James Bond below.
Ian Fleming and ornithologist James Bond
James Bond (1900–1989) He was a leading American ornithologist whose name was appropriated by writer Ian Fleming for his fictional spy James Bond.
The real Bond was born in Philadelphia and worked as an ornithologist at the Academy of Natural Sciences in that city, rising to become curator of birds there. He was expert about Caribbean birds and wrote the definitive book on the subject: Birds of the West Indies , first published in 1936 and, in its fifth edition, still in print (ISBN 0618002103).
Ian Fleming, who was a keen bird watcher living in Jamaica, was familiar with Bond's book, and chose the name of its author for the hero of Casino Royale in 1953, apparently because he wanted a name that sounded "as ordinary as possible."
Linus Pauling (1901-1994) He is the only person who has won two undivided Nobel Prizes. In 1950 he constructed the first satisfactory model of a protein molecule, a discovery which has implications for the understanding of the living cell.
George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984) He was an American paleontologist. He was an expert on extinct mammals and their intercontinental migrations. He was the most influential paleontologist of the twentieth century and a major participant in the Modern synthesis. .
Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) She studied the dark kernels in corn and discovered “Jumping Genes.†The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; she was the first and only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category.
Konrad Lorenz (1903–1989) He was an Austrian zoologist, animal psychologist, and ornithologist. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology. Lorenz studied instinctive behavior in animals, especially in greylag geese and jackdaws. Working with geese, he rediscovered the principle of imprinting (originally described by Douglas Spalding in the 19th century) in the behavior of nidifugous birds.
Louis Leakey (1903–1972) He was a British archaeologist whose work was important in establishing human evolutionary development in Africa.
B. F. Skinner (1904 –1990), was a highly influential American psychologist, author, inventor, advocate for social reform and poet. He was the Edgar Pierce Professor of Psychology at Harvard University from 1958 until his retirement in 1974. He invented the operant conditioning chamber, innovated his own philosophy of science called Radical Behaviorism, and founded his own school of experimental research psychology – the experimental analysis of behavior.
Ernst Mayr (1905-2005) One of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. His work has contributed to the conceptual revolution that led to the synthesis of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution , and to the development of the biological species concept. His theory of peripatric speciation has become widely accepted as one of the standard modes of speciation, and is the basis of the theory of punctuated equilibrium.
George Ledyard Stebbins, Jr. (1906 –2000) was an American botanist and geneticist who is widely regarded as one of the leading evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. Stebbins received his Ph.D. in botany from Harvard University in 1931. He went on to the University of California, Berkeley, where his work with E. B. Babcock on the genetic evolution of plant species, and his association with a group of evolutionary biologists known as the Bay Area Biosystematists, led him to develop a comprehensive synthesis of plant evolution incorporating genetics.
Niko Tinbergen (1907-1988) He was a Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl Von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) was a French naval officer, explorer, ecologist, filmmaker, scientist, photographer and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the aqua-lung, and pioneered marine conservation. He was commonly known as Jacques Cousteau or Captain Cousteau.
Mary Leakey (1913–1996) She was a British physical anthropologist, who, along with others, discovered the first skull of a fossil ape on Rusinga Island. For much of her career she worked with her husband Louis Leakey in the Olduvai Gorge, uncovering the tools and fossils of ancient homonids. She also discovered the Laetoli footprints.
John Maynard Smith, F.R.S. (1920–2004) was a British evolutionary biologist and geneticist. Originally an aeronautical engineer during the Second World War, he then took a second degree in genetics under the well-known biologist J.B.S. Haldane. Maynard Smith was instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution and theorized on other problems such as the evolution of sex and signaling theory.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) Her X-ray crystallography pictures made it possible for Watson and Crick to figure out the structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA).
James Watson (1928 - ) & Francis Crick (1916-2004) They won the Nobel Prize in 1962 for figuring out the structure of DNA.
Sir David Attenborough (1926 - ) He is the presenter of many ground-breaking and award winning BBC wildlife documentaries, and a former senior manager for the BBC. He has travelled widely, originally to collect animals for zoos. He is also an anthropologist and is on the advisory board of BBC Wildlife magazine. If you like Biology documentaries you have probably seen or you should check out his exellent well produced shows:
1990 The Trials of Life
1995 The Private Life of Plants
1998 The Life of Birds
2000 State of the Planet
2001 The Blue Planet
2002 The Life of Mammals
2005 Life In The Undergrowth
E.O. Wilson (1929 - ) His groundbreaking research, original thinking, and scientific and popular writing have changed the way humans think of nature, and our place in it. In direct contradiction with the anthropocentrism of many social scientists, Wilson strongly believed that all animals, including humans, should not be excluded from evolutionary analyses. He outlined a new field of study, known as sociobiology, that demanded the inclusion of the social sciences and the humanities in evolutionary theory (Sociobiology: A New Synthesis, 1975). He provided biological explanations for behaviors such as altruism, which although controversial, helped to pave the way for modern behavioral biology.
Jane Goodall (1934 - ) She is the English primatologist, ethologist and anthropologist, probably best-known for conducting a forty-year study of chimpanzee social and family life, as director of the Jane Goodall Institute in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.
Carl Edward Sagan (1934 –1996) was an American astronomer and astrochemist and a highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He is world-famous for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which has been seen by more than 600 million people in over 60 countries, making it the most widely watched PBS program in history. A book to accompany the program was also published. During his lifetime, Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books including Contact. In his works, he frequently advocated skeptical inquiry, humanism, and the scientific method.
In this clip taken from Cosmos Carl takes us on a voyage following a single cell through evolution to where we humans are today.
Leigh M. Van Valen (1935-) was the first to propose the Red Queen's hypothesis (1973) as an explanatory tangent to his proposed Law of Extinction. The Law drew upon the apparent constant probability [not rate] of extinction in families of related organisms. The data were compiled from the existing literature on duration of tens of thousands of genera throughout the fossil record.
Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) He was a New York-born American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read writers of popular science of his generation. He spoke out against what he saw as cultural oppression in all its forms, especially pseudoscience in the service of racism and sexism.
Richard Dawkins (1941 - ) He is a British ethologist and popular science writer. He is best known for popularising the Williams Revolution in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene and being an outspoken atheist and humanist.
Stanley Prusiner (1942 - ) He was intrigued by spongiform encephalopathies when a patient died of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease ; he later studied the related sheep disorder scrapie and in 1982 reported isolation of its causative agent, which he called a prion . Initially criticized, his prion theory was eventually generally accepted, and his research received world attention when mad cow disease emerged in Britain. The theory may also shed light on disorders such as Alzheimer disease and parkinsonism, which share traits with prion-based diseases. His work won him a 1997 Nobel Prize.
J. Craig Venter (1946 - ) is an American biologist and businessman. Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research and was instrumental in mapping the human genome. He was listed on Time Magazine's 2007 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.
Kenneth R. Miller (born 1948) is a biology professor at Brown University. Miller, who is Roman Catholic, is particularly known for his opposition to creationism, including the intelligent design movement. He has written a book on the subject entitled Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution, in which he furthers the argument that a belief in evolution is compatible with a belief in God.
This is a presentation Miller gave on Intelligent Design.
Matt Ridley (1958 - ) He did research in zoology at Oxford before becoming a journalist. Ridley is author of Nature Via Nurture (2003), Genome (1999), The Origins of Virtue (1996) and The Red Queen : Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993). He popularized The Red Queen hypothesis which is intended to explains the advantage of sexual reproduction at the level of individuals, and the constant evolutionary arms race between competing species by mixing mother's and father's genes, sexual reproduction may allow a species to adapt quickly just to hold onto the ecological niche that it already has in the ecosystem.