The theory of evolution I had always thought as being from modern times, you know an idea made popular by Charles Darwin, it was nice to discover I was wrong. I like finding out stuff I didn’t originally know. The idea actually dates back to ancient times, the Greeks, Romans, Chinese and early Muslims all promoted ideas of evolutionary theory, though in different forms as we understand now.
Anaximander of Miletus, circa 610-546 B.C.E., proposed the idea that the very first animals lived in water, in Earth’s distant past, he theorised that during this period the Earth was going through a wet phase, and that the first land dwelling ancestors of us, humans, must have been water borne, spending only a small part of their time on dry land.
In China the idea of Taoism regards humans, nature and the heavens as existing in a state of constant transformation in response to differing environments.
Titus Lucretius Carus in 50 B.C.E. wrote On The Nature of Things, which provides the best surviving explanation of the ideas of the Greek Epicurean philosophers. It describes the development of the Cosmos, the Earth and living things upon the Earth, including humans and their societies, as being purely naturalistic mechanisms without any interference from a supernatural agency.
The ideas these Greeks and Romans had about creation, about existence died out in Europe when the Roman Empire eventually fell, though their ideas were not lost to Islamic philosophers and early scientists. Ibn Khadun’s scientific thoughts anticipated the biological theory of evolution. In 1377 Ibn Khaldun published the Muqqadimah, in which he asserted that we humans originally developed from the world of monkeys, in some sort of process by which a species became more numerous.
In the 18th Century, with the emergence into science of paleontology, naturalists began to develop ideas that animals had indeed changed from their original forms, altering the previously held ideas that all animals had always been the way they are.
In 1800 the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck presented in a lecture the idea that animals had evolved naturally over a vast period of time, and that in many cases the environment gave rise to changes in animal species. Though his idea was mostly rejected, some modern evolutionary biologists claim he was the primary evolutionary theorist, and influenced evolutionary biology right up to the present day.
Later in the 1800s, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace published their theory of evolution. Their ideas proposed an idea of common descent and a tree of life. Leading to the idea, shocking at the time, that two very different species could share a common ancestor. For the first half of the 19th Century the scientific community believed that although geology showed that the Earth and life upon it, was very old, that humans had only appeared a few thousand years ago. A series of discoveries in the 1840’s and 1850’s proved their beliefs wrong, stone tools were discovered alongside the bones of now extinct animals, demonstrating that some form of human existed beside species of animals long since dead.
In 1863 Charles Lyell’s Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, proposed the idea, which became widely accepted, that humans had existed during a prehistoric period, which stretched back many thousands of years before the beginnings of written history. At that time there was no fossil evidence to demonstrate such human evolution.
Carolus Linnaeus had been criticised for grouping humans and apes together as primates. But within a few years of the publication of The Origin of Species the concept of evolution became widespread within the scientific community. Thus began the divide between science and religion. Science had factual evidence to prove evolution to be a truth.
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