![]() ![]() When it comes to the evolution of life, various philosophers and scientists, including an eighteenth-century English doctor named Erasmus Darwin, proposed different aspects of what later would become evolutionary theory. Scientists talk about evolution as a theory, for instance, just as they talk about Einstein’s explanation of gravity as a theory.Ī theory is an idea about how something in nature works that has gone through rigorous testing through observations and experiments designed to prove the idea right or wrong. In science, the word “theory” indicates a very high level of certainty. His idea, however, was not a theory in the scientific meaning of the word, because it could not be subjected to testing that might support it or prove it wrong. ![]() From this reasoning, he proposed that all life began in the sea.Īnaximander was correct humans can indeed trace our ancestry back to fish. He concluded that those ancestors must be fish, since fish hatch from eggs and immediately begin living with no help from their parents. Noting that human babies are born helpless, Anaximander speculated that humans must have descended from some other type of creature whose young could survive without any help. Ideas aimed at explaining how organisms change, or evolve, over time date back to Anaximander of Miletus, a Greek philosopher who lived in the 500s B.C.E. ![]()
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