Pre-Darwin Human Origins

[Just thinking]

Does anyone know what non-religious explanations were given to explain human origins before the idea of Darwinian evolution became commonly available? Were religious explanations basically the only game in town say a mere 200 years ago?

 

[BenBurch]

Does anyone know what non-religious explanations were given to explain human origins before the idea of Darwinian evolution became commonly available? Were religious explanations basically the only game in town say a mere 200 years ago?

Well, the concept of evolution pre-dates Darwin, to be sure. His grandfather was an evolutionist, in fact.

And before that there were various materialistic explanations such as spontaneous generation.

And then we go back to the Platonic conception of a Demiurge which might not have been a personal god, but which operated in a metaphysical realm we could only perceive through philosophy.

 

[Professor Yaffle]

Lamarkian evolution (passing on of characteristics acquired during one's lifetime) was fairly popular before and around the time of Darwin (and Darwin did not rule it out completely). But I don't know what it had to say specifically about human evolution.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamarckism

 

[MG1962]

Can I strongly recomend Deborah Cadbury's Dinosaur Hunters. Examines the history of palentology in the pre-Darwin world

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dinosaur-Hunters-Scientific-Discovery-Prehistoric/dp/1857029631

Simply outstanding

 

[dacium2007]

Ancient greeks even wrote some evolution type ideas (lucretius is a name that comes to mind wrote about slowly growing and changing and passing on traits to offspring). But the bibles was taken as literal truth for an extremely long time in the west, and if you said anything against it you were likly to be killed. I think it is fairly accurate to say that even evolution was not taken extremely seriously until more advancaed biology came along (atomic chemistry/dna etc.)

 

[CurtC]

Lamarckian evolution would have addressed the mechanism for changes, but I had the impression that it was Darwin who figured out that all life descended from a common ancestor. I don't really see how Lamarckian ideas would have applied to a person in 1807 wondering how humans came to be unless I'm wrong on that.

I think this question is the reason that enlightened people 200 years ago were deists instead of atheists. As Dawkins has said, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.

I also think that had many of the famous deists of 200 years ago had access to our modern knowledge of evolution and astronomy, they would have been atheists.

 

[Just thinking]

I also think that had many of the famous deists of 200 years ago had access to our modern knowledge of evolution and astronomy, they would have been atheists.

I think this is a key issue ... many times we hear believers comment on how many great minds of the past were religious folk. This may have been one of the major reasons --- How do we explain human origins without a Creator? Of course, it was basically the only game in town.

 

[TX50]

Lamarkian evolution...

There is much more to early ideas of evolution than just Lamarck. The
thinkers of the French enlightenment are particularly interesting. Diderot's
ideas in the mid 18th century were startlingly similar to Darwin's natural
selection in its major aspects. Diderot did retain a bit of the old notion of
vitalism, though. His contemporary, the Baron d'Holbach, dispensed with even
that in his "System of Nature" of 1770 (called "The Atheists Bible" by his
contemporaries). None of these were scientific theories, however (as
opposed to metaphysical, philosophical views).

The notion that modern humans had evolved from an earlier form was already
well established in ancient times. Plato, Aristotle and Lucretius are usually
particularly mentioned in regard to this. More modern ideas of human
evolution gradually developed in parallel with the scientific study of anatomy
and geology in the 18th and 19th centuries.

 

[blutoski]

Jennifer Michael Hecht's book Doubt contains a few examples of infidels who were burned at the stake in the late Middle Ages, many of whom had made the mistake of voicing naturalistic creation beliefs.

Most weren't scientists, so they had ideas that we'd find goofy today - for example, that the world and everything in it congealed as-is from an amorphous fluid precursor, like cheese out of milk.