The Transmutation of species and transformism are 18th and early 19th-century ideas about the change of one species into another that preceded Charles Darwin's theory of evolution through natural sele
This 1847 diagram by Richard Owen shows his conceptual archetype for all vertebrates.
Darwin's finches by Gould
Evolutionary thought, the recognition that species change over time and the perceived understanding of how such processes work, has roots in antiquity. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonom
Transmutation of species
…like the anatomists Georges Cuvier and Richard Owen, and the geologist Charles Lyell, was intense. The debate over them was an important stage in the history of evolutionary thought and influenced the subsequent reaction to Darwin's theory. Transmutation was one of the names commonly used for evolutionary ideas in the 19th century…
The tree of life as depicted by Ernst Haeckel in The Evolution of Man (1879) illustrates the 19th-century view of evolution as a progressive process leading towards man.
The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus argued that humans originated from fish.
Plato (left) and Aristotle (right), a detail from The School of Athens (1509 – 1511) by Raphael
Augustine of Hippo, shown in this sixth-century AD Roman fresco, wrote that some creatures may have developed from the "decomposition" of previously existing organisms.