to the Academy, and said, 'This is Plato's man.'"Other prominent Greeks advanced the idea of evolution. Aristotle taught the doctrine of evolution in his Ladder of Nature, of which Erik Nordenskoid wrote, "Here we find enunciated for the first time a really complete theory of evolution." Democritus, who came up with an early version of the atomic theory, had an evolutionary theory, and Epicurius described the theory plainly in his writings. Paleontologist and curator of the American Museum of Natural history for many years, Henry Fairfield Osborn, considered Empedocles to be the father of evolutionary thought.The Chinese philosopher Chuangtse formulated a close approximation to the evolutionary theory, and some ancient Hindu ideas have an evolutionary outlook in their theory of the soul's development through re-incarnation.Since the beginning of the Renaissance in the late fourteenth century evolutionary ideas began to take shape in the minds of many philosophers. More than one author has said that by the time of the eighteenth century the entire intellectual atmosphere of England and Europe was actually saturated with the idea of evolution.Many of these ideas came out of the schools of the French, German and Spanish naturalists, who contended that all species of life were derived from purely natural consequences of adaption to various environmental conditions. The terminology was somewhat different then, the phrase "transformation of species" was used instead of the present Darwinian version, "evolution of species," thus these precursors of Darwin were called "transformists" or "transformationists," much as a modern believer in evolution would be called an "evolutionist."The renowned political philosopher Rousseau (1712-1778) clearly demonstrated in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, written in 1754, that evolutionary ideas of man's descent from an animal form were very well known in his day, and that these ideas went all the w...
