As early as 400 BC the Greek atomists taught that the sun, earth, life, humans, civilization, and society emerged over eons from the eternal and uncreated atoms colliding and vibrating in the void -- all without divine intervention. In the epic poem On the Nature of Things, the Roman atomist Lucretius in about 60 BC described the stages of the living earth coming to be what it is. The earth and sun formed from swirls of dust congregated from atoms colliding and vibrating in the void; early plants and animals sprang from the early earth's own substance because of the insistence of the atoms that formed the earth; the aging earth gave birth to a succession of animals including a series of progressively less brutish humans that made a succession of improved tools, laws, and civilizations with increasing complexity finally arriving at the current earth and lifeforms as they are.

Robert Carneiro, the anthropologist, describes the progression of evolutionary thought at two levels. First, there was the succession of explanations that did not require divine intervention. And second, there were occasional uses of derivatives of the Latin word "evolutio," meaning "unroll like a scroll," to label the explanations. Carneiro describes it this way: "In the seventeenth century, 'evolution' began to be used in English to refer to an orderly sequence of events, particularly one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start." Since the outcome was already contained within every prior stage of the earth, life, and universe, everything would happen as it has without divine intervention.

In giving an example of an early form of evolutionism theory, Carneiro notes that Gottfried Leibniz in 1714 explained the motion of objects by the "monads" inside them where the monads operated by internal forces, so no outside force was required to make things happen as they did. The historian of ideas Arthur Lovejoy points to the "monad" or "germ" idea as a characteristic of typical evolutionary thought from 1700 to 1850; as such, it maintained that "the 'germs' of all things have always existed . . . [such that they] contain within themselves an internal principle of development which drives them on through a vast series of metamorphoses" through which they become the geological formations, lifeforms, psychologies, and civilizations of the present.

An early application of evolutionary thinking to biology was Charles Bonnet's 1762 assertion that each feature of the embryo was preformed in the parts; some of the parts came from the egg and some came from the sperm. Bonnet hypothesized that when the embryo grew, those preformed parts merely expanded, shifted, and rearranged themselves to grow into the adult. Hence, Bonnet was called a "preformationist." This idea long preceded modern embryology.

Carneiro conjectures that it was this "preformationist" connotation of the word "evolution" that caused Jean-Baptiste Lamarck in 1809 to exclude the word "evolution" from his 1809 treatise Philosophie Zoologique. For Lamarck proposed that a parent's learning to play an instrument would be passed on to the children as acquired traits--the direct opposite of the popular notions of "evolution" at the time which asserted that the parent passed on the "germs" given by the grandparents unaltered by the parent's learning.

After Erasmus Darwin established his medical practice in Derby, England, he began to put to paper in 1780 his many speculations on the processes that made the current 1) geological formations, 2) lifeforms, 3) psychological types, 4) star systems, 5) science advancements, and 6) political reforms. Erasmus Darwin wrote most of his speculations on the evolutionary processes in verse form. He made the most complete statement in a poem he first titled "Origin of Society," but he changed the title to "Temple of Nature." In the poem, he describes the beginning of life and the formation of the diverse life forms. Against a vast cyclical background of star formation and collapse, he describes the eons of time until a "general conflagration" in which the planets and sun fall into "one central chaos" from which new earths sometimes appear, "Which in process of time may again undergo the same catastrophe!" Between the times of conflagration, he describes the spontaneity with which life springs forth again to populate the earth.


He describes how the animals compete with each other, driven by "three great objects of desire," namely sex, hunger, and fear. Through the competition, "the strongest and most active . . . [will] propagate the species, which should thence become improved."

Paul Elliott summed up Erasmus Darwin's writings this way, "Five interconnected aspects of [Erasmus] Darwin's Enlightenment evolutionary worldview may be discerned: geological developmentalism, biological evolutionism, developmental psychophysiology, cosmological developmentalism, and scientific and political progressivism."

Furthermore, Erasmus Darwin was an organizer of a group of amateur scientists around Derby that would remain influential into the 1850s, the time of his grandson Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin became the first president of the Derby Philosophical Society, which was something of a gentleman's social club, literary society, and scientific forum for discussing recent scientific discoveries and publications. Around Erasmus Darwin, there formed a small lively amateur scientific community that included the grandparents of Herbert Spencer. Herbert Spencer's father would become an active amateur scientist and speculator on evolutionary processes in his own right, and when he grew up would become the secretary of the Derby Philosophical Society. Herbert Spencer would later develop a vast evolutionary theory of his own that included cosmological, geological, biological, social, and cultural processes.

Balzac wrote in La Comedie Humaine, 1842, "There exists but one animal. The Creator used only one pattern for all organized beings. An animal is an entity taking its shape, or rather its different shapes, from the environment in which it develops."

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