Evolutionary Ideas of The Renaissance and Enlightenment - Mid 18th Century

Mid 18th Century

In his Venus Physique in 1745, and System of Nature in 1751, Pierre Louis Maupertuis veered toward more materialist ground. He wrote of natural modifications occurring during reproduction and accumulating over the course of many generations, producing races and even new species. He also anticipated in general terms the idea of natural selection.

Vague and general ideas of evolution continued to proliferate among the mid-eighteenth century Enlightenment philosophers. G. L. L. Buffon suggested that what most people referred to as species were really just well-marked varieties. He thought that the members of what was then called a genus (which in terms of modern scientific classification would be considered a family) are all descended from a single, common ancestor. The ancestor of each family had arisen through spontaneous generation; environmental effects then caused them to diverge into different species. He speculated that the 200 or so species of mammals then known might have descended from as few as 38 original forms. Buffon's concept of evolution was strictly limited. He believed there were "internal molds" that shaped the spontaneous generation of each family and that the families themselves were entirely and eternally distinct. Thus, lions, tigers, leopards, pumas and house cats could all share a common ancestor, but dogs and house cats could not. Although Darwin's foreword to his 6th edition of Origin credited Aristotle with foreshadowing the concept of natural selection, he also wrote that "the first author who in modern times has treated it in a scientific spirit was Buffon".

Some 18th-century writers speculated about human evolution. John Mitchell, a physician and cartographer, wrote a book in 1744 called An Essay upon the Causes of the Different Colours of People in Different Climates in which he claimed that the first race on earth had been a brown and reddish colour he said "that an intermediate tawny colour found amongst Asiatics and Native Amerindians" had been the “original complexion of mankind” and that others races came about by the original race spending generations in different climates. Between 1767 and 1792 James Burnett, Lord Monboddo included in his writings not only the concept that that man had descended from other primates, but also that, in response to their environment, creatures had found methods of transforming their characteristics over long time intervals. He also produced research on the evolution of linguistics, which was cited by Erasmus Darwin in his poem Temple of Nature. Jan-Andrew Henderson states that Monboddo was the first to articulate the theory of natural selection.

In 1792, philosopher Immanuel Kant presented, in his Critique of Judgement, what he referred to as “a daring venture of reason”, in which “one organic being derived from another organic being, although from one which is specifically different; e.g., certain water-animals transform themselves gradually into marsh-animals and from these, after some generations, into land-animals.” Some 20th-century philosophers, such as Eric Voegelin, credit Kant with foreshadowing modern evolutionary theory.

In 1796, Erasmus Darwin published Zoönomia, which suggested "that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament ... with the power of acquiring new parts" in response to stimuli, with each round of improvements being inherited by successive generations. In his 1802 poem Temple of Nature, he described the rise of life from minute organisms living in the mud to its modern diversity:

First forms minute, unseen by spheric glass,
Move on the mud, or pierce the watery mass;
These, as successive generations bloom,
New powers acquire and larger limbs assume;
Whence countless groups of vegetation spring,
And breathing realms of fin and feet and wing.