Additional Content and Quiz Questions Relating to Darwin's Ghosts

In my other summer MALA class, 6040 Detective Literature, Dr. McRae has acknowledged the improvement of Wikipedia and its transformation into a credible source. When looking for additional material that sums up some the work Stott mentions in Darwin’s Ghosts, I discovered this Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_evolutionary_thought and found it to be a fairly comprehensive timeline of evolutionary research. The quiz questions below only deal with Darwin’s predecessors, as that was the focus of the book I chose, but I recommend reading the entire article as it gets into contemporary research.

1. What is essentialism and how does it relate to Darwin’s concept of natural selection?
2.  Which scientist published research on natural selection in the same year as Darwin?
3. Which philosopher is credited with first organizing species into a “ladder of life” or “great chain of being,” grouping them in hierarchical order by their complexity?
4.  Which Islamic philosopher wrote extensively about the “struggle for existence,” saying, "Every weak animal devours those weaker than itself. Strong animals cannot escape being devoured by other animals stronger than they. And in this respect, men do not differ from animals…?”
5. Which naturalist asserted that species developed “mechanically, without divine guidance” during the Renaissance and Enlightenment?
6. Who published Philosophie Zoologique in 1809 which included the original theory of transmutation?
7. Who published An Essay on the Principle of Population in the late 18^th century and why was it relevant?
8. What year was On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection first published?