Animal Origins, Minds and Capacities

Abstract

From the earliest stages of Classical literature, ancient writers were occupied with the origins of, and the differences between, men and animals. The Presocratic philosophers attempted some scientific explanations of the origins of the various species, from Anaximander in the early sixth century BC (with his puzzling but prescient statement that men owe their origins to fish)¹ to the fifth-century Archelaus’s two-stage view on the emergence of short-lived versions of all species followed by the development of species which were able to reproduce, and his contemporary Empedocles’s theory of the random spontaneous emergence of body parts which gradually joined together in a progressive series of extinctions and survivals, in which human and animal body parts occasionally (and unsuccessfully) mixed. These ideas come tantalizingly close to our privileged modern knowledge of evolution by natural selection, and it is no coincidence that the theory of common origins came from Empedocles, a philosopher who urged abstention from cruelty and sacrifice (see below, §§148–9), but unfortunately his position attracted continuous criticism throughout the Classical period and, as Gordon Campbell notes, it remained the case that ‘Plato and Aristotle have been far more influential to the formation of modern thought’² with their ideas on animal behaviour and capabilities formulated in the sophisticated culture of philosophical debate in fifth-century Athens.