List of time points and events with their direct mini paper/explanation hyperlinks

Please note: because this page is just the time points/events with the time points/evemts hyperlinked to their respective discussion pages themselves, the numeric citation hyperlinks in the brackets will not link to those specific source hyperlinks, but the numeric citations still do indeed map to the complete list of sources (my bibliography) found here. Additonally, the individual citation hyperlinks work on the “Timeline” page, which is here. Thank you!

1500s and 1600s

• Between 6th and 5th centuries BC: Approximate writing of the Book of Genesis; Approximately 8 CE: The Metamorphoses, Ovid
• 1543: First printing of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres
• 1551-1558 and 1587: Conrad Gesner’s History of the Animals published
• 1620: Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum published
• 1618-1621: Printing of Johannes Kepler’s Epitome Astronomiae Copernicanae
• 1667: Nicolas Steno dissects the head of a shark and publishes his findings
• 1668-1704: John Ray’s Historia Plantarum published

1700s

• 1733-1734: Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man published
• 1735: First edition of Carl Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae printed in the Netherlands
• 1776: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith is published
• 1788: James Hutton’s paper Theory of the Earth printed, introduces uniformitarianism
• 1794: Erasmus Darwin, Charles Darwin’s grandfather, publishes Zoonomia
• 1798: Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population is published anonymously; Malthus is later revealed to be the author

1800s

• 1802: William Paley’s work, Natural Theology is published, giving the famous “Divine Watchmaker” analogy
• 1809: Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique is published
• 1816-1817: Georges Cuvier’s The Animal Kingdom published
• 1830: Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology published
• 1844: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation is published anonymously; the author is later revealed to be Robert Chambers
• 1858: Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace jointly publish On the tendency of species to form varieties; and on the perpetuation of varieties and species by natural selection
• 1859: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is published
• 1869: Friedrich Miescher isolates “nuclein” from cell nuclei

1900s to now

• 1928: Frederick Griffith’s showed a “transforming principle,” setting the stage for more inquiry into the building blocks of life
• 1943: Erwin Schrodinger discusses that genetic material most likely resembles an “aperiodic crystal”
• 1944: The Avery–MacLeod–McCarty experiment shows that DNA is the “transforming principle”
• 1951-1953: Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin investigate the structure of DNA; the structure is eventually revealed to be an antiparallel double helix, with Watson and Crick publishing their notable paper in 1953
• 1959: Karl Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery published
• 1961: The Nirenberg and Matthaei experiment deciphers the first codon in genetic code
• 1962: Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is published
• 1973: Theodosius Dobzhansky’s essay Nothing in Biology Makes Sense except in the Light of Evolution is published
• 2020: Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for CRISPR