Evolutionary Ideas Prior to Darwin

Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, his magnum opus, in 1859, spurring a revolution in the way we view biology and the living creatures in our world. While Darwin may have been the first to fully articulate the intricacies of evolutionary natural selection, he was not the first to toy with the concept of the transformation of species.

Benoit de Maillet, a French diplomat and natural historian who lived from 1656 to 1738, was amongst the first to formulate an evolutionary hypothesis which would run contrary to Christian theology. In his main work, Telliamed—which was published in 1748, a decade after his death—he puts forth the idea that all terrestrial animals originated in the ocean. He believed that birds came from flying fish; that lions were descended from sea lions; and that man came from “l’homme marin”—the mermaid’s husband. The essential principle was that the aquatic organisms find their way to land and adapt accordingly.¹

Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon, was a French naturalist best known for his controversial thirty-six-volume Histoire Naturelle, published from 1749 to 1788—the year of his death. His lucid descriptions of natural phenomena occurring due to material causes rather than divine works, once again, were contrary to the church’s doctrine.² Particularly, he held the belief that the plants and animals observed today actually devolved, or degenerated, after dispersing from a central locus of creation. Due to this wild notion, he is considered one of the fundamental precursors to Darwin—despite the fact he would later recant his belief in the face of religious disapproval.³

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, yet another French naturalist—who lived from 1744 to 1829—was among the first to introduce a particular mechanism by which the transformation of species could occur. In 1802, he proposed an extraordinarily original and comprehensive theory of organic evolution to explain the gradual production of all life on Earth.⁴ Lamarck suggested that an organism alters itself by attempting to adapt to its environment through the use or disuse of its parts. From here, the modifications are then inherited by the organism’s offspring. This establishes a line of descendants in which new species appear intermittently. This is called “Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics”, and while it was later empirically discredited, Darwin himself would use this concept as a stepping stone in his own work.

These are but a mere few of the great minds who circled the idea of the transformation of species prior to Charles Darwin, whose own grandfather—Erasmus Darwin—believed useful traits could be passed down through biological inheritance. From there, the revelatory achievements in the field of geology in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries helped to establish a foundation upon which Charles Darwin could build his theory of the process of natural selection.