On the Origin of Evolution

Tracing 'Darwin's Dangerous Idea' from Aristotle to DNA

John Gribbin, Mary Gribbin

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780008333409
• eBook ISBN: 9780008333386
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

The theory of evolution by natural selection did not spring fully formed and unprecedented from the brain of Charles Darwin. Rather it has been examined and debated by philosophers the world over for thousands of years.

PART ONE

ANCIENT TIMES

CHAPTER ONE

THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY

In nineteenth-century Europe, the idea of evolution was revolutionary because it overturned the established Christian tradition of an essentially unchanging world in which everything, including the forms of living things, had been fixed by God. This tradition actually predated Christianity. In Ancient Greece, Plato, his student Aristotle and the Stoics all taught that the forms of all living things were fixed by the gods. Plato’s philosophy was based on the idea of ‘essence’. He argued that the essence is the perfect embodiment of an object. There is, for example, an essential, perfect triangle, but any triangle we can draw on Earth is only an imperfect approximation to the essence. In the same way, each kind of plant or animal has a God-given essence. There is an essential horse, a perfect example of its kind, which incorporates all the characteristics of horsiness, but any living horse on Earth is only an imperfect representation of the essential horse, which is why horses differ from one another. But a horse could never be changed into, say, a zebra, any more than a triangle can be changed into a square.

Aristotle, who lived from 384 BCE to 322 BCE, developed this idea further, and was particularly influential on later generations of Christian thinkers because much of his writing was preserved. It was Aristotle who gave those thinkers the idea of a ‘great chain of being’, or a ‘ladder of life’, in which different kinds of life on Earth are placed in order of their complexity (with human beings, of course, at the top). He stated that the properties of living things showed that they had what he called a ‘final cause’, meaning that each variety had been designed for a purpose. But what is equally interesting for us is that Aristotle took the trouble to reject the ideas of his predecessor Empedocles (c. 490 BCE to 430 BCE), who had put forward the idea that the forms of living things might have originated by chance. If Empedocles was important enough to be noticed in this way, his ideas must have had some contemporary influence. This was not a theory of evolution, but in a sense it did involve the idea of natural selection. Aristotle explained the process, but only in order to say that it was nonsense and absurd. After pointing out how front teeth are sharp and adapted to cutting food, while back teeth are broad and adapted to grinding, he wrote that it ‘may be said’ that this is not by design, but because the:

… arrangement came about by chance; and the same reasoning is applied to other parts of the body in which existence for some purpose is apparent. And it is argued that where all things happened as if they were made for some purpose, being aptly united by chance, these were preserved, but such as were not aptly made, these were lost and still perish, according to what Empedocles says.[2]

Aristotle dismisses this as ‘impossible’ – such things could not be produced ‘by fortune or chance’. But what he is actually dismissing here is the idea that front and back teeth should suddenly appear, among a variety of different kinds of teeth, with only the most ‘apt’ surviving. What the ancients failed to grasp is the gradualness of evolution, the way small changes build up over many generations. A closer look at what Empedocles said highlights this.

Empedocles’ ideas have only come down to us in fragments of his writing, and in references to his work made by other writers. The fragments have been collected and translated by William Leonard (published in 1908), and they give us a glimpse of Empedocles’ vision of a primordial origin of life in which grotesque combinations of heads, bodies, eyes and limbs were joined at random:

There budded many a head without a neck,

And arms were roaming, shoulderless and bare,

And eyes that wanted foreheads drifted by

…

In isolation wandered every limb,

Hither and thither seeing union meet

…

These members fell together where they met,

And many a birth besides was then begot

In a long line of ever varied life.

…

Creatures of countless hands and trailing feet.

…

Many were born with twofold brow and breast,

Some with the face of man on bovine stock,

Some with man’s form beneath a bovine head,

Mixed shapes of being …

But only the forms best suited for life survived and reproduced. Although according to his scenario all this happened long ago, there is a hint in his writings that Empedocles believed that some form of evolution might continue in the present day, because living creatures are still imperfect.

An earlier Greek philosopher, Anaximander (c.610 BCE to 546 BCE), is regarded as one of the first proponents of the scientific approach to nature, trying to explain different aspects of the world by assuming that nature is ruled by laws. As with Empedocles, very little of his writing survives, but we learn from later authors of a particularly perceptive insight. Anaximander pointed out that because human beings have an extended infancy and are helpless when young, the first humans could not have appeared as unprotected babies. His solution to the puzzle was that fish emerged in the primordial ocean before humans, but that the first humans developed in some way inside fish-like creatures, in a kind of capsule floating in the water, where they could grow until puberty before, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, they burst out as adults capable of looking after themselves. There is more than a hint here of the idea that the first human beings were not created fully formed.

Epicurus (341 BCE to 270 BCE) leaned more towards Empedocles’ version of events, complete with monstrosities. He was a materialist who saw no role for gods. In his view, the first creatures formed through combinations of atoms, and those that were best at surviving did, while others did not. His philosophy was propounded and developed by the Roman author Lucretius (c. 99 BCE to c. 55 BCE), whose poem De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) provides the best summary of this line of thinking of his Greek predecessors.

Lucretius was an atomist, who believed that the world is only a temporary arrangement of these fundamental particles (as we would now describe them). This was one of his arguments against there being a benevolent creator, because such a being would, he argued, have ensured that his creation would last forever (it’s worth noting that Plato used the argument the other way round, saying that the world had been created by a benevolent god, so it must be everlasting). And, Lucretius pointed out, if the world has been made by a benevolent creator and designed for our benefit, why was it so hostile to human life? He also addressed the question of how life on Earth got started. The young Earth, he thought, was so fertile that life forms emerged spontaneously from the ground, in all kinds of random structures. Most of these died because they were unable to feed or reproduce, but a few kinds survived because they had strength or cunning, or (a sign that even Lucretius thought people were special) because they were useful to humankind. But he also emphasises that the creatures that survived had to be capable of reproducing their kind. There are clear elements here of the modern idea of evolution by natural selection. There must be a variety on which selection can act, and species must be able to reproduce successfully. But there is no suggestion that the process of reproduction might produce the variety on which selection could act. And the selection process is, once again, seen as something that happened long ago and has now stopped. The ancients did not have a theory of evolution as we now understand it, but some of them at least had the basis of an idea as to why different forms of life seem to be designed for their roles among the multitude of forms of life on Earth.

What we might think of as precursors of evolutionary ideas were also discussed in other cultures. In China, Zhuang Zhou (c. 369 BCE to 286 BCE), one of the founders of Taoist philosophy, referred to biological change. Taoism rejects the idea of fixed biological species, talking instead of ‘constant transformation’, and comes close to providing an image of the ‘struggle for survival’ – an image that independently influenced the thinking of both Darwin and Wallace. In the biological world, every species is the prey of another. Even creatures at the top of the food chain, such as lions, are ‘preyed upon’ by diseases. Taoists explain this lack of harmony by arguing that if there was a species that was not preyed upon in this way, it would reproduce unchecked, consuming all resources and leading to its own end. If human beings wipe out disease and continue to reproduce unchecked, they put themselves and the world in danger. A variation on this theme, expressed not by a Taoist philosopher but by the eighteenth-century English cleric Thomas Malthus, would influence the thinking of Darwin and Wallace.

Closer to home, both geographically and historically, Islamic scholars puzzled over the relationship between the living and non-living worlds, the interactions of different forms of life with one another, and the relationship between human beings and other animals. Aristotle was translated into Arabic in the first half of the ninth century, and in the tenth century what we would now call science became a matter of intense debate among the scholars in Spain, then part of the Islamic world. In the ninth century, al-Jahiz (776 CE to 868 CE) wrote in his Book of Animals (Kitab al-Hayawan):

All animals, in short, cannot exist without food, neither can the hunting animal escape being hunted in his turn. Every weak animal devours those weaker than itself. Strong animals cannot escape being devoured by other animals stronger than they. And in this respect, men do not differ from animals, some with respect to others, although they do not arrive at the same extremes. In short, God has disposed some human beings as a cause of life for others, and likewise, he has disposed the latter as a cause of the death of the former.[3]

Some of these scholars had the beginning of an understanding of the immense length of time for which the Earth, and life on Earth, had existed. The Persian polymath Avicenna (c. 980 CE to 1037 CE) wrote:

Mountains may be due to two causes. Either they are effects of upheavals of the crust of the Earth, such as might occur during a violent earthquake, or they are the effect of water, which, cutting for itself a new route, has denuded the valleys, the strata being of different kinds, some soft, some hard. The winds and waters disintegrate the one, but leave the other intact. Most of the eminences of the Earth have had this latter origin. It would require a long period of time for all such changes to be accomplished, during which the mountains themselves might be somewhat diminished in size.[4]

In the thirteenth century, the Persian polymath Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201 to 1274) discussed the way in which organisms are adapted to their environments, using language that has sometimes been interpreted as describing a theory of evolution; but this seems to be to some extent wishful thinking. In his book Akhlaq-i Nasiri, Tusi dealt with a variety of biological topics and described his version of the ladder of life. His discussion of the origin of life echoes that of Lucretius, by starting in the chaos from which order and life originated, with some forms of life succeeding and others failing. The passage that excites people looking for early evolutionary thinking reads:

The organisms that can gain the new features faster are more variable. As a result, they gain advantages over other creatures. […] The bodies are changing as a result of the internal and external interactions.

But it is far from clear whether Tusi is suggesting that these changes are being acquired as one generation succeeds another, or whether an individual is changing its body in response to environmental stresses – the idea now known as Lamarckism, which we discuss later (Chapter Four).

This ambiguity also applies to the interpretation of the words of other Islamic scholars. In 1377, in his book Al-Muqaddimah, Ibn Khaldun (1332 to 1406) wrote:

The animal world then widens, its species become numerous, and, in a gradual process of creation, it finally leads to man, who is able to think and reflect. The higher stage of man is reached from the world of monkeys, in which both sagacity and perception are found, but which has not reached the stage of actual reflection and thinking. At this point we come to the first stage of man. This is as far as our [physical] observation extends.

It is not clear whether he was talking about the development of humans from monkeys, rather than simply placing species on the ladder of creation, but he does also refer to ‘transformations of some existent things into others’.

This is enough to show that long before Darwin and well beyond the boundaries of Western Europe there were people who thought seriously about humankind’s place in nature, and the relationship of living species to one another. The fact is, though, that our modern understanding of evolution did emerge from the Christian society of Western Europe, where its development was certainly not helped by the established religious environment. But things might have followed a different path even within the context of Christian thinking, if the Church followers had taken more notice of some of its early thinkers.

Some important figures in the early Christian Church realised that the biblical account of the Creation in Genesis should not be taken literally, and saw that life on Earth must have developed in some way from more primitive origins, even if all this was guided by God. Origen of Alexandria (c. 184 to c. 253) was one of the most important early Christian philosopher-theologians, who produced an enormous body of work. This included his advocacy of the idea that the Bible story should be considered as an allegory, and not a literal account of the creation of the world. For his pains (not just for this idea), Origen was condemned as a heretic by a council at Alexandria in the year 400, and in 543, the Emperor Justinian I repeated the condemnation and ordered all his writings to be burned. As with Aristotle’s denunciation of Empedocles, the fact that Justinian bothered to do this nearly three hundred years after Origen died shows how wide his influence was.

By the time Justinian was retrospectively censoring Origen, Bishop Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine, 354 CE to 430 CE) had made his own contribution to the debate about Genesis. Augustine was another prolific writer, and his ideas on various subjects changed over time, but one of his key teachings was that if a literal interpretation of the Bible conflicts with logic and reason (what he regarded as our God-given ability to reason, which made it all the more important), then the Bible story should be interpreted as metaphor or allegory. The stories had been written, he argued, in this simple form to make them intelligible to the people who lived at the time when Genesis was written. This suggestion comes in Book V of his epic work De Genesi ad Litteram (On the Literal Interpretation of Genesis). He says that the correct interpretation of Genesis is that animals and plants emerge from water and earth and ‘develop in time … each according to its nature.’ He makes an analogy with the growth of a tree from a seed, emerging from the earth and developing into the mature form. But he does not make this analogy with the growth of, say, an animal from an embryo, but with species developing from simpler beginnings. God created the potentiality for living things, which were duly brought forth ‘in the course of time on different days according to their different kinds’. This is change, but not really evolution, because everything is planned in advance by God. ‘In accordance with those kinds of creatures which He first made, God makes many new things which He did not make then … God unfolds the generations which He laid up in creation when first He founded it.’ Developing from his seed analogy, Augustine says:

In the [seed] there is invisibly present all that will develop into the tree. And in this same way we must picture the [origin of the] world … This includes not only the Heaven with the Sun, Moon and stars … it includes also the beings which water and earth produced in potency and in their causes before they came forth in the course of time.

‘Plant, fowl and animal life are not perfect,’ says Augustine, ‘but created in a state of potentiality.’

In another book, De Genesi (On Genesis), he writes, ‘To suppose that God formed man from dust with bodily hands is very childish … God neither formed man with bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips.’ Although his theology became one of the main pillars of the Church, somehow this aspect of Augustine’s thinking was neglected in favour of the simplistic biblical account, promulgated for the benefit of the uneducated masses. What if things had been different? In his contribution to the debate in the second half of the nineteenth century following the publication of On the Origin of Species, Henry Osborn wrote, in his book From the Greeks to Darwin:

If the orthodoxy of Augustine had remained the teaching of the Church, the final establishment of Evolution would have come earlier than it did, certainly during the eighteenth instead of the nineteenth century, and the bitter controversy over this truth of Nature would never have arisen … Plainly as the direct or instantaneous Creation of animals and plants appeared to be taught in Genesis, Augustine reads this in the light of primary causation and the gradual development from the imperfect to the perfect of Aristotle. This most influential teacher thus handed down to his followers opinions which closely conform to the progressive views of those theologians of the present days who have accepted the Evolution theory.

Whether the views of those nineteenth-century theologians went far enough is another matter, if they simply saw evolution in terms of primary causation and the gradual development from the imperfect to the perfect of Aristotle.

Aristotle’s ideas took root in the Western Christian Church after the twelfth century, when Latin translations of Islamic texts that were themselves translations of Ancient Greek texts became available to scholars. The most influential of these scholars was Thomas Aquinas (1225 to 1274), another saint. Although he did not agree with Augustine’s interpretation of the seven days of creation as a metaphor, and believed it was literally true that God created the world in six ordinary days and rested on the seventh, he seems to have approved of much of what Augustine said, interpreting the story of Genesis as meaning that God stopped making new creatures on the seventh day in the sense that everything that came afterwards was not original, because it had a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Praise for John and Mary Gribbin
• Evolution in a Nutshell
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part One: Ancient Times
• Part Two: The Middle Ages
• Part Three: Modern Times
• Footnotes
• Endnotes
• Sources and Further Reading
• Index
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About This Book
• About the Publisher