Introduction
Charles Darwin was the one of the greatest minds of the nineteenth century, with remarkable synthetic abilities and powers of observation. However, ideas about evolution had been around for some time. In fact, aspects extend back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. While not every historical development can be incorporated into this essay, taking a historical perspective on the development of evolutionary theory allows one to appreciate more fully the extraordinary clarity and understanding possessed by Darwin.
Pre-Renaissance
Twenty centuries before Darwin, the Greeks were developing an understanding of the origin and development of life. Thales (c. 636–546 BC) presented a mechanistic explanation for the world. He emphasized a physical basis for all things, proposed water as the basic building block of all living and nonliving matter, and was one of the earliest precursors of modern scientific thought. Empedocles (c. 495–435 BC) was responsible for the four classical...
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Bentley-Condit, V., Smith, E.O. (2019). Impact of Early Theory on Charles Darwin. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1284-1
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