Evolutionary ideas of the renaissance and enlightenment

Evolutionary ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment developed as natural history

Natural history

Natural history is the scientific research of plants or animals, leaning more towards observational rather than experimental methods of study, and encompasses more research published in magazines than in academic journals. Grouped among the natural sciences, natural history is the systematic study...

became more sophisticated during the 17th and 18th centuries, and as the scientific revolution

Scientific revolution

The Scientific Revolution is an era associated primarily with the 16th and 17th centuries during which new ideas and knowledge in physics, astronomy, biology, medicine and chemistry transformed medieval and ancient views of nature and laid the foundations for modern science...

and the rise of mechanical philosophy encouraged viewing the natural world as a machine whose workings were subject to analysis. Despite this the evolutionary ideas of the early 18th century were of a religious and spiritural nature. In the 2nd half of the 18th century more materialistic and explicit ideas about biological evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

began to emerge making this an important era in the history of evolutionary thought

History of evolutionary thought

Evolutionary thought, the conception that species change over time, has roots in antiquity, in the ideas of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Chinese as well as in medieval Islamic science...

17th and early 18th century

The word evolution (from the Latin

Latin

Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...

evolutio, meaning "to unroll like a scroll") appeared in English in the 17th century, referring to an orderly sequence of events, particularly one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start. Notably, in 1677 Sir Matthew Hale

Matthew Hale (jurist)

Sir Matthew Hale SL was an influential English barrister, judge and jurist most noted for his treatise Historia Placitorum Coronæ, or The History of the Pleas of the Crown. Born to a barrister and his wife, who had both died by the time he was 5, Hale was raised by his father's relative, a strict...

, attacking the atheistic atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, used the term evolution to describe his opponent's ideas that vibrations and collisions of atoms in the void — without divine intervention — had formed "Primordial Seeds" (semina) which were the "immediate, primitive, productive Principles of Men, Animals, Birds and Fishes." For Hale, this mechanism was "absurd", because "it must have potentially at least the whole Systeme of Humane Nature, or at least that Ideal Principle or Configuration thereof, in the evolution whereof the complement and formation of the Humane Nature must consist ... and all this drawn from a fortuitous coalition of senseless and dead Atoms."

While Hale (ironically) first used the term evolution in arguing against the exact mechanistic view the word would come to symbolize, he also demonstrates that at least some evolutionist

Evolutionism

Evolutionism refers to the biological concept of evolution, specifically to a widely held 19th century belief that organisms are intrinsically bound to increase in complexity. The belief was extended to include cultural evolution and social evolution...

theories explored between 1650 and 1800 postulated that the universe, including life on earth, had developed mechanically, entirely without divine guidance. Around this time, the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, reinforced by the physics

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

of Galileo and Newton

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton PRS was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived."...

, began to encourage the machine-like view of the universe which would come to characterise the scientific revolution

Scientific revolution

. However, most contemporary theories of evolution, including those developed by the German idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel (and mocked by Schopenhauer), held that evolution was a fundamentally spiritual process, with the entire course of natural and human evolution being "a self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute".

Typical of these theorists, Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was a German philosopher and mathematician. He wrote in different languages, primarily in Latin , French and German ....

postulated in 1714 that "monad

Monad

-Philosophy:*Monad a term meaning "unit" used variously by ancient philosophers from the Pythagoreans to Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus to signify a variety of entities from a genus to God....

s" inside objects caused motion by internal forces, and maintained that "the 'germs' of all things have always existed ... [and] contain within themselves an internal principle of development which drives them on through a vast series of metamorphoses" to become the geological formations, lifeforms, psychologies, and civilizations of the present. Leibniz clearly felt that evolution proceeded on divine principles — in his De rerum originatione radicali (1697), he wrote: "A cumulative increase of the beauty and universal perfection of the works of God, a perpetual and unrestricted progress of the universe as a whole must be recognized, such that it advances to a higher state of cultivation." Others, such as J. G. von Herder, expressed similar ideas.

Mid 18th century

In his Venus Physique in 1745, and System of Nature in 1751, Pierre Louis Maupertuis

Pierre Louis Maupertuis

Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis was a French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He became the Director of the Académie des Sciences, and the first President of the Berlin Academy of Science, at the invitation of Frederick the Great....

veered toward more materialist ground. He wrote of natural modifications occurring during reproduction and accumulating over the course of many generations, producing races and even new species. He also anticipated in general terms the idea of natural selection

Natural selection

Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....

.

Vague and general ideas of evolution continued to proliferate among the mid-eighteenth century Enlightenment

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

philosophers. G. L. L. Buffon suggested that what most people referred to as species were really just well-marked varieties. He thought that the members of what was then called a genus (which in terms of modern scientific classification would be considered a family) are all descended from a single, common ancestor. The ancestor of each family had arisen through spontaneous generation

Spontaneous generation

Spontaneous generation or Equivocal generation is an obsolete principle regarding the origin of life from inanimate matter, which held that this process was a commonplace and everyday occurrence, as distinguished from univocal generation, or reproduction from parent...

; environmental effects then caused them to diverge into different species. He speculated that the 200 or so species of mammals then known might have descended from as few as 38 original forms. Buffon's concept of evolution was strictly limited. He believed there were "internal molds" that shaped the spontaneous generation of each family and that the families themselves were entirely and eternally distinct. Thus, lions, tigers, leopards, pumas and house cats could all share a common ancestor, but dogs and house cats could not. Although Darwin's foreword to his 6th edition of Origin credited Aristotle

Aristotle

Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

with foreshadowing the concept of natural selection

Natural selection

, he also wrote that "the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon".

Some 18th century writers speculated about human evolution. John Mitchell

John Mitchell (geographer)

John Mitchell was a colonial American doctor and botanist. He created the most comprehensive and perhaps largest 18th-century map of eastern North America, known today as the Mitchell Map...

, a physician

Physician

A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...

and cartographer, wrote a book in 1744 called An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates in which he claimed that the first race on earth had been a brown and reddish colour he said "that an intermediate tawny colour found amongst Asiatics and Native Amerindians" had been the “original complexion of mankind” and that others races came about by the original race spending generations in different climates. Between 1767 and 1792 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo was a Scottish judge, scholar of linguistic evolution, philosopher and deist. He is most famous today as a founder of modern comparative historical linguistics . In 1767 he became a judge in the Court of Session. As such, Burnett adopted an honorary title based on his...

included in his writings not only the concept that that man had descended from other primates, but also that, in response to their environment, creatures had found methods of transforming their characteristics over long time intervals. He also produced research on the evolution of linguistics

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

, which was cited by Erasmus Darwin in his poem Temple of Nature. Jan-Andrew Henderson states that Monboddo was the first to articulate the theory of natural selection

Natural selection

.

In 1792, philosopher Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....

presented, in his Critique of Judgement

Critique of Judgement

The Critique of Judgment , or in the new Cambridge translation Critique of the Power of Judgment, also known as the third critique, is a philosophical work by Immanuel Kant...

, what he referred to as “a daring venture of reason”, in which “one organic being [is] derived from another organic being, although from one which is specifically different; e.g., certain water-animals transform themselves gradually into marsh-animals and from these, after some generations, into land-animals.” Some 20th century philosophers, such as Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin

Eric Voegelin, born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, was a German-born American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, then Imperial Germany, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna. He became a teacher and then an associate professor of political science at the...

, credit Kant with foreshadowing modern evolutionary theory.

In 1796, Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin

Erasmus Darwin was an English physician who turned down George III's invitation to be a physician to the King. One of the key thinkers of the Midlands Enlightenment, he was also a natural philosopher, physiologist, slave trade abolitionist,inventor and poet...

published Zoönomia

Zoönomia

Zoonomia; or the Laws of Organic Life is a two-volume medical work by Erasmus Darwin dealing with pathology, anatomy, psychology, and the functioning of the body...

, which suggested "that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament ... with the power of acquiring new parts" in response to stimuli, with each round of improvements being inherited by successive generations. In his 1802 poem Temple of Nature, he described the rise of life from minute organisms living in the mud to its modern diversity:

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,

Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;

These, as successive generations bloom,

New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;

Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,

And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.

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