creation of plants and animals. The omnipotence that primitive peoples ascribed to their deities made it natural for them to believe that the gods created everything in existence. For this reason, the origins of the Earth, the heavens, the seas, plants and animals, and men and women were wrapped in unquestioned dogmas, some of which hold true today. It is only comparatively recently, in societies and civilizations possessed of scientific knowledge and methods of investigation, that such dogmas have come under question."Contrary to this opinion though, we find in fact that evolutionary thought is itself a rather old idea. The editors of Biology Today would agree:"Much has been written on whether or not the Darwinian theory was original. Inevitably, historians have concluded that there was little novelty in what Darwin and Wallace were saying. Down through the centuries, from ancient Greek times on, various writers have suggested that new species can arise through the modification of old and that among all the possible organic types, the world contains only those that can survive the struggle for life." (8)This is indeed interesting, that the concept that Darwin is given so much credit for was not even a very modern idea in his own day.We find that Anaximander of Miletus (611 B.C.-546 B.C.) advanced the traditional evolutionary idea, already quite common in his day, that life first evolved from a type of pre-biotic soup, helped along a bit by the rays of the sun. He believed that the first animals developed from sea slime which had been evaporated by the suns rays. He also believed that men were descended from fish. (9)It would seem that the premise of evolutionary thinking hasn't changed much since the ancient Greeks, for William Howells said of Homo sapiens: "Man, therefore, is a modified fish." (10)Howells further wrote, (11)"'Plato having defined man to be a two-legged animal without feathers, Diogenes plucked a cock and brought it in...
