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ERASMUS DARWIN
(1731-1802) was a
Derbyshire inventor,
poet and doctor
who proposed in
Zoonomia (1794-6)
that all living beings
had evolved from
simple aquatic
organisms. He was
the grandfather of
Charles Darwin.JEAN-BAPTISTE
LAMARCK (1744-1829).
A French professor
of invertebrates. He
proposed that all
species had evolved
through great
lengths of time from
simple to complex
organisms through the
inheritance of acquired
characteristics.ALFRED RUSSEL
WALLACE (1823-1913)
was a British collector
and naturalist who in
1858 co-discovered
natural selection
while out in the
Malay Archipelago.CHARLES DARWIN
(1809-1882). The
British naturalist
published On the
Origin of Species by
Natural Selection in- It proposed that
natural selection –
the survival of the
fittest – was the
mechanism by which
evolution worked.
ROBERT CHAMBERS
(1802-1871) was a
Scottish publisher and
encyclopaedist, who
published Vestiges of
the Natural History
of Creation in 1844.
It was an attempt to
marry together all the
recent discoveries
in the sciences to
propose that the Earth
had evolved from a
nebulous fire mist and
that all the species
on it had transmuted
from simple organisms.CAST OF CHARACTERS
demonstrate that life was to be found
within material flesh not outside it.
Debates about the nature and origins
of life had taken a strange new turn.
Altogether stranger evolutionary
ideas began to emerge in Cairo around
the turn of the 18th century. The
French consul here, Benoît de Maillet,
had brought the philosophical
questions of the French salon culture- debates about the age, origin and
natu re of life on Ea r t h – to Egypt. The
ancient remains he saw in the desert
suggested that the Earth was much
older than the French Catholic priests
claimed. The Arab traders and
religious leaders who Maillet met
proposed quite different cosmologies
and ways of understanding the Earth’s
formation. He became convinced that
Egypt – indeed, the Earth’s crust as a
whole – had been formed by waters
gradually receding from a universal
ocean and that all humans had
evolved from ‘seapeople’. Some of
these intermediate forms, he proposed,
still survived. He spent his fortune
travelling around Europe collecting
evidence of seamen sightings. Due to
the heretical nature of his claims, he
was unable to publish his strange
book, Telliamed (his ow n na me spelt
backwards) during his lifetime. It only
bega n to circulate, cla ndestinely, half
a century later.
Freedom of thought
By the 18th century, Paris and
Amsterdam had become hubs of
intellectual subversion, part of a
network that stretched across Europe;
anti-clerical books, pornography,
atheism and books on natural science
or free thought travelled down the
same routes. In Paris, the newly
formed secret police were determined
to keep unorthodox philosophers
under surveillance.
The playwright, philosopher and
encyclopaedist Denis Diderot was one
of the most dangerous subversives
according to the police files. Diderot
had read papers about Trembley’s
polyps, Maillet’s Telliamed, and most
new papers and books on the natural
sciences. In his plays, philosophical
speculations and encyclopaedias, 5Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries,
great thinkers forged the idea of evolution