Pre - Darwinian thinking , the voyage of the Beagle , and the Origin of Species

Some early attempts at scientific or philosophical discussion of life were apparent in Greece. For example, Thales (the earliest of the identified Greek philosophers) argued that everything stemmed ultimately from water. He therefore had a somewhat vague idea that descent with modification was possible, since things had to diversify from a common origin. Aristotle suggested that in every thing is a desire to move from lower to higher forms, and ultimately to the divine. Anaximander might have come closest to our modern conception: he proposed that humans originated from other animals, based on the observation that babies need care for such a long time that if the first humans had started like that, they would not have survived.