De Maillet's Theory of Evolution

Among the earliest people to suggest that life had developed from simple to complex forms was Benoît de Maillet, who lived from 1656 to 1738. He realized his ideas were over the top for his day, so, he didn’t just come right out and declared the evolution of life to be his view. He used instead an old tactic that others had tried before him, to put the ideas out there, but put them out in a form that permits you to say “I’m not saying I believe this, I’m just reporting what others have said”. In this case, de Maillet placed evolutionary ideas into the mouth of an Indian philosopher.

How did de Maillet concluded that the Earth had being evolving in the first place? The answer to that is pretty interesting. He came from a good family in France and ended up as an ambassador to Egypt at the beginning of the 18th century. He went above and beyond the normal practice of making acquaintance of the region. De Maillet traveled widely in the Mediterranean. He was enormously curious about lots of things. For example, he wanted to know about the features of the Earth’s surfaces in the regions he visited.

I think he got some of this natural curiosity from his upbringing. His grandfather seemed to have been a similar kind of person. The family home was near the sea shore, and his grandfather had a theory about the sea that he passed down to his grandson. He thought he observed that the water level of the sea was dropping. De Maillet’s grandfather convinced his grandson of this. When he found himself in Egypt and other places around the Mediterranean, de Maillet began collecting his own information.

He mastered Arabic and read the histories of Arabic writers. When he traveled around he became familiar with historical landmarks, including the historical records that went with them. He deliberately exposed himself to this foreign Near Eastern culture, whose understanding of the history of the Earth was very different from that of Christian France. He became more open to the possibility that history had been going on a lot longer than what he learned as a youth.

When he examined sights from ancient Carthage he determined that the sea level had indeed been higher back when Carthage was an active port. His calculations suggested a rate of drop of three feet in a thousand years. He assumed this rate was and had been constant for a long time. He then turned to the implications of this idea.

De Maillet expanded his new system to include the entire history of the Earth. He was a follower of Rene Descartes, who had used the collisions of matter to explain how everything worked in nature. De Maillet utilized such mechanical interactions together with his own observations to create a non-Christian cosmogony.

The Publication of the Telliamed

De Maillet knew his manuscript tested the limits of acceptability, so he tried to deflect criticism by attributing the views expressed in the book to a pagan foreigner. The title of the work was the foreigner’s name (which was his own name spelled backwards, how original): “Telliamed. Conversations of an Indian philosopher with a French missionary on the diminution of the sea, the formation of the Earth, the origin of man.”

From the alleged Indian understanding of the Earth’s past, the French missionary learned that the Earth was originally covered by water, whose currents carved out the mountains beneath its surface. The depths of the primitive seas gradually decreased, exposing the highest mountains. As the process of diminution continued, more dry land emerged. As the French missionary pondered these ideas, he brought them to their logical conclusion: “This emergence led to the growth of grass and plants on the rocks. The vegetation, in turn, led to the creation of animals. And finally, the animals led to the creation of man, as the last work of the hands of God”.

Telliamed himself did not invoke the direct act of God to explain the appearance of life. He didn’t give details, but he maintained that various forms of aquatic animals had changed during the time the sea was gradually dropping in accordance with natural process. Flying fish grew little wings and became birds. Other fish grew feet and walked on land.

Clearly, such processes had taken a great deal of time, far longer than 6000 years. Using, the rate of diminution of three feet every thousand years, de Maillet concluded that over 2 billion years had passed since the primitive waters had begun to drop. Humans themselves were over 500000 years old.

The public immediately saw through de Maillet technique of camouflaging his ideas in a pagan philosophy. The reaction, I’m sure you’re not surprised, was outrage. Even Voltaire thought de Maillet had gone too far. The years after Telliamed appeared, Voltaire noted that there was no support for such an outrageous notion.

Retribution came down on this heretical work from far more official sources than Voltaire. De Maillet, who was long dead, was safe, but his book was roundly denounced. I find the story of De Maillet very interesting and enlightening. It shows us how difficult it was, and it is still today, to put forth ideas contrary to popular belief.

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Theories of Origins Before Darwin

What were the theories of origins before Darwin? What was there before Darwin? What did people think about the origin of life and the different species on Earty? One thing characterizes people, as Descartes would say, they think. As thinking creatures, we have always wondered about how the universe and things in it originated. We are particularly interested in our own origin.

The first chapter of Genesis contains the Christian creation account. It tells of God creating the heaven and the Earth, plants and animals, and then man in God’s image. All in six days. The Bible doesn’t state when this creation occurred, but most early Christians probably assumed that this did not occur too long ago. In the 1600’s, the Anglican bishop James Ussher fixed the date of creation at 4004 B.C.E. This is the established biblical view that continues to the present.

The Early Scientific Accounts of Origins

Over the past 2000 years, this creationist account did not exist alone within the western tradition. Religious accounts of origins, at least for the past 2000 years, have competed with scientific accounts of origins. Science began with the Greeks, about 600 B.C.E. At this time we find the firsts scientific explanations for natural phenomena.

Although many Greeks retained religious theories about nature founded on revelation or mythical stories, some philosophers proposed materialistic explanations founded on reason. What do I mean by materialistic? This means that they explained natural phenomena without recourse to God or the supernatural. These philosophers said that natural phenomena can be explained as the result of physical matter moving in accord with natural law, with God, at most, as the remote creator of the primordial matter and the laws of motion. We find this sort of account in Plato, for whom God created the primordial matter and its laws, and then left it operate.

Biological origins posed a particular puzzle for Greeks who tried to devise purely materialistic explanations for natural phenomena. Biological organisms, people specially, seemed much more intricate and intelligently designed than just rocks or mountains. They seemed created, and creation implies a creator.

So, to explain the origin of biological organisms, early natural philosophers, like Anaximander and the so-called atomists, proposed crude theories of evolution. They are not very detailed, but they had the idea that there was some sort of spontaneous generation of life and somehow species could evolve over time. They weren’t worked out very well.

Aristotle critiqued these ideas. Aristotle himself was an atheist, and first and foremost, a biologist. He was a very avid observer of life, particularly of fishes. Based on his close study of animals, Aristotle defined a species as a breeding group. A group of particular animals or plants that can breed, and produce offspring that eventually could reproduce. He concluded that species were fixed.

Rejecting both creation and evolution, Aristotle simply saw the species as eternal. They always existed. Later Christian philosophers tried to integrate Genesis with Aristotle. They typically viewed each species as created by God in the beginning, but then, using Aristotelian authority, asserted that these species remained fixed for all time in a perfect (albeit fallen) creation.

This was the dominant view for a millennium in the West. It began to break down, though, when religious authority began to break down.

Deist and Atheist Accounts

The breakdown of religious authority finally occurred during the Enlightenment, in the 1700’s. Notions of evolution began creeping back in. This happened particularly in France, where natural philosophers again struggled to devise purely materialistic explanations for life. Seeking to push God back to the beginning, deists proposed a variety of ideas. They proposed that the solar system was created not by God, but rather a comet once hit the sun and knocked off a bunch of matter, which separated, each piece becoming a planet.

They also proposed ideas for the origin of species. They said that the tremendous array of species evolved from a few common ancestral types. Some of the French natural philosophers were even more atheistical. Denis Diderot, for example, a committed materialist, proposed that all living forms developed by random chance mutations from spontaneously generated organisms.

Probably the most influential natural philosopher from this period was the astronomer Pierre Laplace, who proposed a purely materialistic explanation for the origin of the solar system. He said that the solar system was once a big rotating gas nebula, and as it rotated, centrifugal and centripetal forces would pull in matter to the center, which became the sun, but as it pulled in, it left little blobs of material that collapsed into the different planets. This was called the nebular hypothesis.

When Laplace described his theory to Napoleon, he was asked “how does God fit into it?”, Laplace famously responded “I have no need for God in my hypothesis”.

All the ideas that we’ve gone over were highly speculative and were driven more from philosophy than empirical scientific research. There were a few discoveries at the time, though, that reinforced these ideas.

For example, Abraham Trembley detected that polyps, which are very simple sea creatures, could regenerate. By cutting them into pieces they regenerated the whole. They could be flipped inside out and still operate. People saw this as “almost spontaneous generation”. Philosophers took this as scientific evidence for their speculations.

Overall, however, the empirical research during this period cut the other way. Even if these ideas were speculated about, when people actually did the experimental and observational work in nature, most of them opposed the evolutionary ideas. The generation after the Enlightenment reacted against the speculative nature of evolutionary ideas. They returned to creationism, although not the creationism of the Bible, but a creationism based on scientific evidence. I will discuss this in my next post, when we see how Georges Cuvier founded modern biology.

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