can you name some famous intellects who contributed to the field of molecular biology in the 1940s -1960?
Yes, Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl.
History of evolutionary thought
In the early 1960s, biochemists Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl proposed the molecular clock hypothesis (MCH): that sequence differences between homologous proteins could be used to calculate the time since two species diverged.
who popularized the idea of evolution in the mid 1800s Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. which ancient civilizations helped to shape this thought process? The ancient Greeks, Romans, Chinese, and in medieval Islamic science. what was proposed for this thought process from the first civilization mentioned above? They proposed that one type of animal, even humans, could descend from other types of animals. what was proposed for this thought process from the second civilization mentioned? They described the development of the cosmos, the Earth, living things, and human society through purely naturalistic mechanisms, without any reference to supernatural involvement. and what was proposed by the third civilization about this subject? According to Joseph Needham, Taoism explicitly denies the fixity of biological species and Taoist philosophers speculated that species had developed differing attributes in response to differing environments. what evolutionary ideas were contributed in the field of paleontology? One instance being that of James Hutton describing gradual geological processes operating continuously over deep time.
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History of evolutionary thought [SEP] 1940s–1960s: Molecular biology and evolution
The middle decades of the 20th century saw the rise of molecular biology, and with it an understanding of the chemical nature of genes as sequences of DNA and of their relationship—through the genetic code—to protein sequences. At the same time, increasingly powerful techniques for analyzing proteins, such as protein electrophoresis and sequencing, brought biochemical phenomena into realm of the synthetic theory of evolution. In the early 1960s, biochemists Linus Pauling and Emile Zuckerkandl proposed the molecular clock hypothesis (MCH): that sequence differences between homologous proteins could be used to calculate the time since two species diverged. By 1969, Motoo Kimura and others provided a theoretical basis for the molecular clock, arguing that—at the molecular level at least—most genetic mutations are neither harmful nor helpful and that mutation and genetic drift (rather than natural selection) cause a large portion of genetic change: the neutral theory of molecular evolution.