THE FUNDAMENTALS OF LIFE
ISTOCK,^GETTYAristotle realised that the natural world was actually
ordered, rather than being chaotic and randomTHE THEORY OF
EVOLUTION
Charles Darwin put the pieces together, but he wasn’t the only radical thinker
when it came to evolution. Professor Rebecca Stott reveals how other naturalists
Alfred Russel Wallace and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck were also pioneers
M
ost people know that the
theory of evolution did not
appea r like a bolt f rom t he blue
with the publication of Charles
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in- But not many people are aware
that the idea has been around in
various forms for at least 2,500 years.
Like us, the ancient Greeks failed
to agree about the origins of life. Their
cosmologies were profoundly different
from our own. There were no heresy
laws or inquisitions to fea r or a
dominant creation story to side-step.
Ancient Greek cosmologies were
wildly va ria nt: some believed t hat life
had been shaped by gods; ot hers t hat it
had come into being through atoms
colliding chaotically.
Empedocles – poet, healer, magician
a nd ‘cont roller of stor ms’, as well as a
philosopher – produced a surreal
foreshadowing of natural selection
2,500 years ago on the island that we
now call Sicily. He proposed that life
had started out as random body parts
- eyes, necks, arms, teeth and so on –
suspended in a primeval soup.
Collisions had produced random
combinations – men with the heads
of cattle; animals with branches for
limbs. Some of these combinations
had proved viable, others not.
A century later, Aristotle declared
Empedocles’s t heor y absu rd a nd
unverifiable. Having studied under
Plato in Athens, he spent two intense
years examining animals and plants
on t he isla nd of Lesbos in t he Aegea n
Sea in an attempt to discover the laws
of nature through close observation
rat her t ha n by guesswork. Natu re was
not random and chaotic, he declared;
it was eternal and deeply, perfectly
patterned. Each organism fitted its
place. The flesh of an individual plant
or person might bloom and decay, but
species remained unchanging.
Aristotle was no evolutionist, but
his emphasis on close observation
above speculation makes him integral
to t his long histor y of evolution. He is
considered the father of biology.
No work rivalled t hat of Aristotle’s
detailed study of species for nearlya thousand years. In 9th-century
Baghdad, Al-Jahiz, an Arab
philosopher working at the heart of the
Abbasid Empire, having been inspired
by Aristotle’s recently translated
volumes, set out to write his own
compendium of zoological knowledge.
In his seven-volume work Living
Beings, he described the natural world
in terms similar to the modern concept
of ecosystems; he also saw everywhere
what we would call the adaptation and
diversification of species.
Some schola rs claim t hat Al-Ja hiz
discovered natural selection a
thousand years before Darwin;
they see natural selection in his
descriptions of systems of predation,
co-dependency and survival, but
Al-Jahiz was a devout Muslim and his
volumes, as a n act of worship of Alla h,
described a natural world in which
everything had been assigned its place
in a divinely ordained system. It was
not a mutable system.
In 15th-century Milan, the painter,
inventor and polymath Leonardo
da Vinci read Arabic and Greek
philosophy and natural sciences. One
of the natural philosophical questions
that vexed him was how fossilised
oyster beds had got themselves into
the tops of mountains. But though he
asked questions that would lead 19th-
century geologists to evolutionary 5