Question

What do you mean by linear transformation of species over time?

Answer 1

In its seventeenth-century context, the issue of origins was also tied closely with the debates over the possibility of the spontaneous generation of forms (Roger 1997a, chp. 2). Thomas Burnet, for example, in his On the Increase of the Habitable Earth, seemed to imply that species could simply originate from unformed matter in the earth. The experimental refutations of such theories of spontaneous generation by life scientists such as Francesco Redi (1626–67), weakened, but did not destroy, the belief in spontaneous generation. Evidence for spontaneous generation could always be explained by appeal to Augustine's theory of the pre-existent “seminal reasons”.