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Additional
history of evolutionary thought
English Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopedia
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History of evolutionary thought
Evolutionary thought
, the conception that
species
change over time, has roots in antiquity - in the ideas of the
ancient Greeks
,
Romans
, and
Chinese
as well as in
medieval Islamic science
. With the beginnings of modern
biological taxonomy
in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced
Western
biological thinking:
essentialism
, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from
medieval Aristotelian
metaphysics
, and that fit well with
natural theology
the development of the new anti-Aristotelian approach to
modern science
: as the
Enlightenment
progressed, evolutionary
cosmology
and the
mechanical philosophy
spread from the
physical sciences
to
natural history
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