Theories about the evolution of information in time have begun to be used systematically and repeatedly by communities of scholars to fruitfully generate new knowledge about the past only in 1780, first in German faculties of Protestant theology, among classical linguists and then around the turn of the 19th century in comparative linguistics. Ranke used such theories in the second quarter of the 19th century to generate knowledge of history, and then similar methods spread to biology, geology and archaeology.