A Brief History of Creation Read Online Free

trajectory he could but guess, Anaximander could see living things appearing out of nonliving things. It was simply a change of form of the natural elements, like wood turning to fire, or fire to smoke. Yet he never gave the phenomenon a name. That would be done by one of Anaximander’s intellectual inheritors, Aristotle.
    O NLY TWO ENIGMATIC SENTENCES of Anaximander’s writing survive in the form in which they were originally written: “All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity. They give to each other justice and recompense for injustice, in conformity with the order of Time.” The fragment from On Nature was saved by the Greek philosopher Simplicius and included as a quotation in his commentary on Aristotle’s great work, Physics . Everything else we know about what Anaximander believed comes secondhand from references by the many learned Greeks who read his words, particularly in the work of Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s most important contemporaries.
    More than two hundred years after Anaximander’s death, Theophrastus likely familiarized himself with On Nature in Aristotle’s library, the Lyceum of Athens. The Lyceum had existed long before Aristotle, butAristotle transformed it from a gymnasium that trained athletes for the Olympic Games into an academy for training the greatest young minds of his generation. Would-be philosophers flocked to Athens to the court of Greece’s preeminent intellect, a position Aristotle inherited from his Athenian teacher, Plato. Just as Aristotle had been a student of one of history’s most accomplished thinkers, he, in turn, became tutor to one of history’s greatest conquerors, Alexander the Great. And as Alexander’s conquests grew, so did the splendor of Aristotle’s Lyceum. In addition to his famous library, Aristotle built a botanical garden and a zoo filled with animals from faraway lands, sent back by Alexander from the lands he had conquered.
    Aristotle’s rise to his position as Plato’s intellectual heir was roundabout, and owed much to politics. The most complicated part was that he was not a Greek at all. When he was only eighteen, Aristotle had come to Plato’s Academy from Macedonia, where his father was the court physician to the king, Alexander’s grandfather. Aristotle’s brilliance was obvious, yet when Plato died twenty years later, Aristotle entered a self-imposed exile. Macedonian armies were snatching up Greek cities one by one, and anti-Macedonian feelings ran deep in Athens. Aristotle’s heritage had by then become a liability.
    Aristotle left Athens for the Anatolian Greek city of Assos, just north of Miletus. Eventually, he ended up on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea, where he was met by a friend from his days at Plato’s Academy: Theophrastus. Theophrastus was a native of Lesbos. His given name was Tyrtamus. Because of his eloquence, Aristotle had given him the nickname by which he would later be remembered: Theophrastus, meaning “one who speaks like a god.” Like Aristotle, Theophrastus had wide-ranging interests, but he devoted most of his time to studying the natural world, and botany in particular. Theophrastus wrote two important books on the subject: Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants . He would become widely recognized as antiquity’s greatest authority on flora.
    Aristotle’s interests were more deeply rooted in the animal kingdom. Teeming with all kinds of animal life, shaped by centuries of unique evolution, Lesbos must have been, for Aristotle, a little like the Galápagos would later be for Darwin: an isolated ecosystem that provided the perfect microcosmfor studying the mechanisms of nature. Just as the Galápagos would provide the observational framework for On the Origin of Species , Lesbos was Aristotle’s inspiration for three volumes of naturalism that would eventually