A later atomist, Lucretius wrote about this in more detail. A translation is here you’ll want to ctrl-f for his section on the origins of vegetable and animal life. His position is much like that of Empedocles.
I don’t see why these wouldn’t count as coming up with the idea of natural selection. They obviously lacked any understanding of genetics or how heredity functions. They didn’t have the particular example of the Darwin’s finches to illustrate fine-grained evolution—but Lucretius is talking quite explicitly about about fitness and survival as an explanation for why animals and plants are the way they are.
Successful scientific theories are often prefigured before the experimental capacity and conceptual framework exists for the hypothesis to seem sensible. The interesting question is—how can we identify the equivalent hypotheses of today?
I came here to post this. De rerum natura is clearly a copy of a copy of a reconstruction of a translation of Gary Drescher’s Good and Real, sent back in time 2300 years.
A later atomist, Lucretius wrote about this in more detail. A translation is here you’ll want to ctrl-f for his section on the origins of vegetable and animal life. His position is much like that of Empedocles.
I don’t see why these wouldn’t count as coming up with the idea of natural selection. They obviously lacked any understanding of genetics or how heredity functions. They didn’t have the particular example of the Darwin’s finches to illustrate fine-grained evolution—but Lucretius is talking quite explicitly about about fitness and survival as an explanation for why animals and plants are the way they are.
Successful scientific theories are often prefigured before the experimental capacity and conceptual framework exists for the hypothesis to seem sensible. The interesting question is—how can we identify the equivalent hypotheses of today?
I came here to post this. De rerum natura is clearly a copy of a copy of a reconstruction of a translation of Gary Drescher’s Good and Real, sent back in time 2300 years.
Lots of specific pieces of science fiction come to mind.