History of evolutionary theory
Early ideas
All human cultures have developed their own explanations for the origin of the world and of human beings and other creatures. Traditional Judaism and Christianity explain the origin of living beings and their adaptations to their environments—wings, gills, hands, flowers—as the handiwork of an omniscient God. The philosophers of ancient Greece had their own creation myths. Anaximander proposed that animals could be transformed from one kind into another, and Empedocles speculated that they were made up of various combinations of preexisting parts. Closer to modern evolutionary ideas were the proposals of early Church Fathers such as Gregory of Nazianzus and Augustine, both of whom maintained that not all species of plants and animals were created by God; rather, some had developed in historical times from God’s creations. Their motivation was not biological but religious—it would have been impossible to hold representatives of all species in a single vessel such as Noah’s Ark; hence, some species must have come into existence only after the Flood.
The notion that organisms may change by natural processes was not investigated as a biological subject by Christian theologians of the Middle Ages, but it was, usually incidentally, considered as a possibility by many, including Albertus Magnus and his student Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas concluded, after detailed discussion, that the development of living creatures such as maggots and flies from nonliving matter such as decaying meat was not incompatible with Christian faith or philosophy. But he left it to others to determine whether this actually happened.
The idea of progress, particularly the belief in unbounded human progress, was central to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, particularly in France among such philosophers as the marquis de Condorcet and Denis Diderot and such scientists as Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon. But belief in progress did not necessarily lead to the development of a theory of evolution. Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis proposed the spontaneous generation and extinction of organisms as part of his theory of origins, but he advanced no theory of evolution—i.e., the transformation of one species into another through knowable, natural causes. Buffon, one of the greatest naturalists of the time, explicitly considered—and rejected—the possible descent of several species from a common ancestor. He postulated that organisms arise from organic molecules by spontaneous generation, so that there could be as many kinds of animals and plants as there are viable combinations of organic molecules.
The English physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, offered in his Zoonomia; or, The Laws of Organic Life (1794–96) some evolutionary speculations, but they were not further developed and had no real influence on subsequent theories. The Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus devised the hierarchical system of plant and animal classification that is still in use in a modernized form. Although he insisted on the fixity of species, his classification system eventually contributed much to the acceptance of the concept of common descent.
The great French naturalist Jean-Baptiste de Monet, chevalier de Lamarck, held the enlightened view of his age that living organisms represent a progression, with humans as the highest form. From this idea he proposed, in the early years of the 19th century, the first broad theory of evolution. Organisms evolve through eons of time from lower to higher forms, a process still going on, always culminating in human beings. As organisms become adapted to their environments through their habits, modifications occur. Use of an organ or structure reinforces it; disuse leads to obliteration. The characteristics acquired by use and disuse, according to this theory, would be inherited. This assumption, later called the inheritance of acquired characteristics (or Lamarckism), was thoroughly disproved in the 20th century. Although his theory did not stand up in the light of later knowledge, Lamarck made important contributions to the gradual acceptance of biological evolution and stimulated countless later studies.