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Reviewed by:
  • Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity
  • Michael Ruse
David Sedley . Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity. Sather Classical Lectures, 66. Berkeley-Los Angeles-London: University of California Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 269. Cloth, $29.95.

The history of evolutionary theory is a little bit of a puzzle. Charles Darwin, the author of the Origin of Species in 1859, was the man who made evolutionary ideas reasonable—ideas that were generally accepted—and it was Darwin who provided the major mechanism of natural selection. He was not the first evolutionist, however. For at least one hundred and fifty years, starting with people like the French encyclopediast Denis Diderot, people had been speculating that organisms (including humans) had a natural origin, from primitive forms. But why did these speculations have to wait this long? It is true that Christianity, incorporating as it did the creation stories of Genesis—what the nineteenth-century English essayist Thomas Carlyle called "Jewish old clothes"—was not going to be friendly towards evolution. But what about the Greeks? Did not they get into such ideas?

As a matter of fact we all know that they did, a bit. Empedocles had some fanciful ideas about pieces coming together to make functioning organisms, but these were ideas for which he was roundly scolded by Aristotle. Why? Ernst Mayr, the distinguished, twentieth-century evolutionist, used to argue that Plato was the culprit. (Mayr was good at making moral judgments.) Supposedly, the theory of forms precluded any sort of developmentalism. Jellyfish are jellyfish and cows are cows and humans are humans, and that is an end to it. But many have long suspected that Mayr is probably not entirely (or perhaps even partially) right. Apart from anything else, many nineteenth-century evolutionists (and [End Page 464] some today) have been ardent Platonists, seeing this as the clue to their evolution. There are shared forms (or archetypes, or Baupläne) between very different organisms, pointing to their common ancestry.

Now, we have the definitive work on the Greeks and their thinking about origins. Meaning by 'creationism' creation by an intelligence and not the North American sense of sticking to the literal truth of the Bible, we now know why the Greeks passed on a creationist legacy. University of Cambridge Professor of Ancient Philosophy David Sedley delves into Greek thinking on origins with authority and understanding, throwing out mistakes, giving insights, and solving problems in highly convincing ways. Moreover, perhaps because his book, Creationism and its Critics in Antiquity, started as talks (the 2004 Sather lectures at the University of California, Berkeley), Sedley's writing spells things out for the layman clearly and without condescension.

We start with Anaxagoras (mid-fifth century BCE), someone whom Sedley refers to as a "truly revolutionary thinker" (8). Anaxagoras held that there is a separation of mind and matter and that there was an organizing power or principle, Noûs. Sedley argues that Anaxagoras was truly a creationist in that he thought this Noûs was in some sense responsible for organisms and their natures. The interesting (although perhaps understandable) metaphor is of Noûs as a farmer, as one who grows things.

Next came Empedocles. He accepted the four elements—earth, water, air, fire—arguing that they are constantly being moved and stirred by two competing forces, Love and Strife. The former builds things up; the latter tears them down again. Apparently, Love combines the elements into disembodied parts, which then come together in strange non-working forms, although then some begin to function as organisms as we know them. Then Strife takes over and we have the situation as we find it today. Empedocles was no great lover of humankind, and in particular he saw heterosexual activity as fraught with problems and something best avoided. Of course, it is easy to laugh at someone who believed that there were two-headed oxen and so forth, but as a world picture, one might think that now we are moving along to the truth. (The truth, that is, as we understand it!)

What history shows you is that things are much more complex (and interesting) than this. Socrates and Plato were the philosophers who started...

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