who is considered the founder of the theory of evolution
History of evolutionary thought Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity – in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese as well as in medieval Islamic science. With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology; and the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to modern science: as the Enlightenment progressed, evolutionary cosmology and the mechanical philosophy spread from the physical sciences to natural history. Naturalists began to focus on the variability of species; the emergence of paleontology with the concept of extinction further undermined static views of nature. In the early 19th century Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829) proposed his theory of the transmutation of species, the first fully formed theory of evolution.
Criticism of evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology has generated substantial controversy and criticism. The criticism – which has been most forceful from proponents of constructivist, postmodernist and poststructuralist schools of thought – includes but is not limited to: disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, alternatives to some of the cognitive assumptions (such as massive modularity) frequently employed in evolutionary psychology, alleged vagueness stemming from evolutionary assumptions (such as uncertainty about the environment of evolutionary adaptation), differing stress on the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, and political and ethical issues.[1]