I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to say they didn’t discover natural selection. They tended to believe a lot of other nonsense, though, which made it difficult to fully realize the idea.
Aristotle considered something like natural selection but rejected it because it didn’t otherwise fit his worldview (which was opposed to atomism). Here he considers selection and variation, although he doesn’t mention heritability explicitly.
Why then should it not be the same with the parts in nature, e.g. that our teeth should come up of necessity—the front teeth sharp, fitted for tearing, the molars broad and useful for grinding down the food—since they did not arise for this end, but it was merely a coincident result; and so with all other parts in which we suppose that there is purpose? Wherever then all the parts came about just what they would have been if they had come be for an end, such things survived, being organized spontaneously in a fitting way; whereas those which grew otherwise perished and continue to perish, as Empedocles says his ‘man-faced ox-progeny’ did.
Yet it is impossible that this should be the true view… action for an end is present in things which come to be and are by nature.
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.
Yes: I don’t see any evidence there that Aristotle realised that traits were inherited, or that radiation explains the diversity of life. It seems safe to say that he didn’t really “get” it.
William Jones got quite a bit closer—in 1786 - noting that many languages had evolved from a common ancestor.
Of course Aristotle realized traits were inherited—in particular he name’s semen and menstrual blood as the directors of the child’s development. Heredity is a really obvious thing to civilizations with that practice animal husbandry, and you know—sexual reproduction. And of course no one knew anything about mutation by radiation.
I’m not sure it’s quite accurate to say they didn’t discover natural selection. They tended to believe a lot of other nonsense, though, which made it difficult to fully realize the idea.
Aristotle considered something like natural selection but rejected it because it didn’t otherwise fit his worldview (which was opposed to atomism). Here he considers selection and variation, although he doesn’t mention heritability explicitly.
Source is http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/physics.2.ii.html, part 8. The reference to Empedocles is talking about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empedocles#Cosmogony, who arguably came closer, but it sounds like he had some pretty strange ideas about the origins of things. Anyway, I’d suggest that incorrect (scientific and metaphysical) beliefs were at least as problematic as lack of imagination in this case.
I don’t know too much about Greek philosophy, though, so I’d be interested to hear someone explore this further.
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.
Yes: I don’t see any evidence there that Aristotle realised that traits were inherited, or that radiation explains the diversity of life. It seems safe to say that he didn’t really “get” it.
William Jones got quite a bit closer—in 1786 - noting that many languages had evolved from a common ancestor.
Of course Aristotle realized traits were inherited—in particular he name’s semen and menstrual blood as the directors of the child’s development. Heredity is a really obvious thing to civilizations with that practice animal husbandry, and you know—sexual reproduction. And of course no one knew anything about mutation by radiation.
I was actually referring to radiating organsims—i.e. adaptive radiation—though what I wrote could be seen as being somewhat ambiguous.