This document provides an overview of the history of ideas about evolution and natural history from ancient Greece through the early 19th century. Key figures discussed include Thales, Anaximander, Empedocles, Parmenides, Democritus, Epicurus, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Buffon, Lamarck, Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Erasmus Darwin, and Robert Grant. Their ideas ranged from essentialism and fixism to early proposals of transmutation of species and gradual evolution over long periods of time in response to environmental factors.

1. Before
Darwin

2. “In the beginning there was only Chaos,
Hesiod the Abyss
But then Gaia, the Earth, came into being,
~700 BCE
Her broad bosom the ever-firm
foundation of all,
And Tartaros, dim in the underground
depths,
And Eros, loveliest of all the Immortals,
who
Makes their bodies (and men’s bodies) go
limp,
Mastering their minds and subduing their
wills.”

3. Thales of Miletus
~624 to ~546 BCE
“Western philosophy began with
Thales” (Bertrand Russell, 1945)
Natural explanations for
observed events, e.g. earthquakes
What is the “first
principle” (arche) from which all
things are made?
Is change real? What causes it?

4. Anaximander
~610 to ~ 546 BCE
Material monism
Aperion is in motion and splits
into hot (fire) and cold (air &
earth)
Change occurs due to law-like
forces

5. Anaximander
~610 to ~ 546 BCE
“[T]he first animals were produced
in moisture, enclosed in thorny
barks ... they came out onto the
drier part”
“Humans were born from other
kinds of animals”
“[T]here arose from heated water
and earth either fish of animals very
like fish. In these, humans grew ...”

6. Shared Values
Commitment to argument and critical inquiry, together
with a view about the nature of justification
Commitment to the idea that the natural world could
be explained in terms that do not refer to anything
beyond nature itself

7. Pythagoras of Samos
~570 to ~495 BCE
The kosmos was ordered and not
chaotic.
Essentialism
Non-evolutionary
Metempsychosis

8. Heraclitus
~535 to ~475 BCE
“The Riddler”
Τα Πάντα ῥεῖ - “Everything flows”
The logos (account, word) was the
single divine law of the universe that
governs all change and we can come
to understand it.
Logos manifests itself as fire, always
changing yet always the same.

9. Parmenides
Born ~515 BCE?
The world as it appears is false.
Change is impossible, and existence is
timeless, uniform, and unchanging.
Clear influence on Plato.

10. Democritus
~460 to ~370 BCE
There is no purpose (telos),
prime mover or final cause
Mechanistic explanation
involving indestructible atoms.
The universe is composed of
nothing but tiny atoms
churning which collide
together to form larger units.

11. Epicurus & Lucretius

12. Plato
Essentialism
Change couldn’t happen
Soul
Demiurge

13. Aristotelian
Cosmology
Sphere Change Composition
Terrestrial Mutable Four Elements
Celestial Immutable Quintessence

15. Medieval
Christianity
Augustine’s naturae
(essences)
Aquinas’ demiurge
Universities

16. “The Great Chain of Being”
Linear
Static
Essentialistic

17. Cabinets of Curiosities

18. Carl von Linné
1707 -1778

19. Rene Descartes
Dualism
Mind/Body
“Cogito ergo sum”

20. Julien Offray de La
Mettrie
L’homme Machine, 1748
Man as a purely material entity
Mind or soul were products of
matter (materialism)

21. Hylozoism
Belief that matter itself is,
in some primitive way, alive
or aware.
Extension of ideas of
Baruch Spinoza and
Gottfried von Leibniz

22. Denis Diderot
1713 - 1784
Rêve de d’Alembert
Matter is alive,
primitively aware, and
always trying out new
combinations
No constraints

23. Materialism
Replace Creator with forces of nature
Continual state of flux
No fixed species
No pre-determined path of development

24. Charles Bonnet
Preformationism
Possibility for (pre-
determined) change
over time, i.e.
transmutation.

25. Philosophical Palingesis
1770
Females carry within them all future generations in a
miniature form.
These miniature beings (homunculi) would be able to
survive even great cataclysms such as the biblical Flood;
These catastrophes brought about evolutionary change, and
that after the next disaster, men would become angels,
mammals would gain human-like intelligence, and so on.
Evolution? Pre-determined and dependent on catastrophes
(divine).

26. Jardin du Roi / Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle

27. Jardin du Roi / Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle

28. Jardin du Roi / Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle

29. Jardin du Roi / Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle

30. Georges-Louis Leclerc
(Comte de Buffon)
Spontaneous generation
Species as fixed entities with
a characteristic “internal
mold”
Theory of degeneration

32. Georges Cuvier
“Correlation of Parts”
Required for viable whole
Made evolution impossible
“Conditions of Existence”
Impose links between parts and
environment
“Subordination of Characters”
Characters related to movement
and sensitivity more important

33. The Problem of Extinction
Due to catastrophes:
Global or local?
Biblical Flood?
Not really extinct:
In other areas?
Transmutated?

34. Cuvier on Extinction
Initial cohabitation of all forms
Extinction due to massive
alterations of the position of
land and sea
Unaffected populations would
re-colonize areas

35. Cuvier on Evolution
Essentialism
Discontinuity between “types”
Only superficial character
vary
Creation by divine will - no
scale of perfection
Man qualitatively different

36. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-
Hilaire
Unity of type has transcendent
importance not a pragmatic
consequence of limited
options
Environmental change would
affect embryonic growth
Saltational transmutation

37. Jean-Baptiste Antoine de Monet,
Le Chevalier de Lamarck
Patronage of Buffon
Flore Françoise (1779)
Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle (1789)
Professor of “insects, worms and
microscopic animals” (1794)
Began to accept transmutation (1800)
Philosophie Zoologique (1809)
Histoire Naturelle des Animaux sans
Vertèbres (1815-’22)

39. “Lamarckism”
Chance in environment brings
Change in “needs” (besoins), brings
Change in behavior, brings
Change in organ usage and development, brings
Change in form over time - Transmutation!

41. First Law
“use and disuse”
“In every animals which has not passed the limit
of its development, a more frequent and
continuous use of any organ gradually
strengthens, develops and enlarges that organ,
and gives it a power proportional to the length
of time it has been so used; while the
permanent disuse of any organ imperceptibly
weakens and deteriorates it, and progressively
diminishes its functional capacity, until it finally
disappears.”

42. Second Law
“inheritance of acquired characteristics”
“All the acquisitions or losses wrought by nature on
individuals, through the influence of the
environment in which their race has long been
placed, and hence through the influence of the
predominant use or permanent disuse of any
organ; all these are preserved by reproduction to
the new individuals which arise, provided that the
acquired modifications are common to both sexes,
or at least to the individuals which produce the
young”

43. Not a problem!

44. Lamarck on Man
"[I]f some of the quadrumanous
animals...were to lose...the habit
of climbing trees and grasping the
branches with its feet...and if the
individuals of this race were
forced for a series of generations
to use their feet only for
walking... there is no doubt...that
these quadrumanous animals
would at length be transformed
into bimanous”

45. Why The Change?

46. Lamarck
was ...
a believer in the great age of the
Earth
a gradualist
a strong supporter of the
importance of behavior and the
environment
a believer in branching evolution
the first modern evolutionist

47. Darwin & Lamarck
Lamarck precedes Darwin regarding fact of
evolution (non-static world)
Shared belief in use and disuse
Lamarck’s theory of adaptation is as legitimate
as Darwin’s provided his premises are valid.

48. Erasmus Darwin
Lunar Society
Botanic Garden 1791
Zoonomia 1794
To “Darwinize”

49. Erasmus Darwin
ORGANIC LIFE beneath the shoreless waves
Was born and nurs'd in Ocean's pearly caves;
First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire, and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin, and feet, and wing.

50. Darwin and Robert Grant
“I listened in silent
astonishment, and as far as
I can judge, without any
effect on my mind. I had
previously read the
'Zoonomia' of my
grandfather, in which
similar views are
maintained, but without
producing any effect on
me.”

51. “Frenchified” Views
Association of radical
materialist views with
working-class agitation
Change vs Stability