Charles Darwin Was Not Original

The ancients were writing about evolution more than two millennia before

Photo by Felipe Simo on Unsplash

“Charles Darwin” and “evolution” are almost synonymous — but what if I told you that Darwin was only building on an idea that was already ancient and widely-known?

Before we dive into the history, there’s an important distinction to make between “evolution” and “evolutionary theory”:

• Evolution is the fact of between-generation change in organisms, which accumulates over millions or billions of years to produce widely disparate forms
• Evolutionary theory is the mechanism of how this works — sometimes it’s just an accumulation of unimportant random mutations (‘genetic drift’), sometimes it’s by natural selection, and sometimes by a host of other, more obscure mechanisms.

It’s important to understand this because, while Darwin was the first to popularise “evolution by natural selection”, he was by no means the first to think about or even be a proponent of the fact of evolution.

The Greeks

Pre-Socratics

Amongst the Greeks — a renowned peoples whose great combined intellect influences thought even 2000 years later — there were multiple what-we-might-call “evolutionary thinkers”.