A Brief History of Creation Read Online Free Page A

secure his place as the founder of biology.
    Of all Aristotle’s works in what would one day be called the sciences—mathematics, geology, physics—none had more of a lasting impact than his biological observations. Even though he made some serious mistakes—he believed, for instance, that women had more teeth than men—he was still such a keen observer and careful cataloger that nearly two millennia later, learned men could still read his works, not merely as quaint antiquated musings, but as exemplars of the world’s finest naturalistic thought right up until the Renaissance. The Europeans of the next two thousand years looked at his observations in much the same way they looked at the colossal buildings of the Romans—in wonderment at the lost knowledge that had built the things that they, the inheritors, could not.
    In his seminal book History of Animals , Aristotle laid out a vision of the animal world not unlike the “tree of life” that would one day be constructed by evolutionists, with long rows of species gradually evolving into humans. Had Aristotle made such a drawing, his animal kingdom would have looked much the same, with each species differing only slightly from those at either side. But Aristotle believed—as his master Plato had believed—that species, like the universe they inhabited, did not change. Nature was perfect. By all rights, Aristotle, armed with his catalog of natural observations, should have been the first evolutionist. Yet even with his ample evidence, he never guessed at the answer that many of his fellow philosophers—most famously Lucretius and Epicurus—stumbled upon.
    Still, Aristotle shared the belief held by Anaximander and most others that life could naturally arise from nonlife. Just as Aristotle found plants such as mosses that could propagate without seeds, he also found animals and insects that did the same. He called the process “spontaneous generation,” a phrase he first used in History of Animals :
    Now there is one property that animals are found to have in common with plants. For some plants are generated from the seed of plants,whilst other plants are self-generated through the formation of some elemental principle similar to a seed. . . . So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs.
    Of all the writings by Greek philosophers about spontaneous generation, Aristotle’s concept was the one that would be most remembered. As the Greek world gave way to the Roman, and the Roman to the Christian, Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation was kept alive in the works of one of the most influential Christian thinkers of all time.
    I N THE YEAR AD 415 , a mob of Egyptian Christians dragged a woman named Hypatia from her home, stripped her naked, and paraded her through the streets of Alexandria before finally beating her to death with tiles. Hypatia was a mathematician who taught classical theories to anyone who would receive them, whether Christian or pagan. She identified herself as a Neoplatonist, adherent to a revivalist movement centered around classical Greek philosophy. Her public stoning was the result of an uprising against what the mob felt were irreligious actions taken by the city’s prefect, Orestes. The seventh-century bishop John of Nikiû later explained that Hypatia “was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music and she beguiled many people with her Satanic wiles.” For modern chroniclers of the early church, the death of Hypatia would come to be seen as a turning point when people in the Western world began to