Although it is customary to credit the inception of this theory to Charles Darwin and his immediate predecessors, a rudimentary form of this notion can be traced back to the beginnings of written history itself. In fact, the belief that life had its origins in a single basic substance is so wide-spread among the various peoples of the world, primitive or civilized, that it can be considered one of the few universal themes in the history of ideas.(Ernest L. Abel, Ancient Views on the Origin of Life, Farleigh; Dickinson University Press, 1973, p. 15.)
Ancient Views on the Origin of Life, Ernest Abel says that the Greek Miletian philosophers before Socrates drew their concepts of evolution in the context of the creation of the universe from the leaders of even more ancient Egyptian, Babylonian or Sumerian religions… For that reason, he adds, EVOLUTION IS IN NO WAY A MODERN DISCOVERY, but rather a modern form of a world (superstitious) religion that has denied belief in Allah (God) in before the dawn of history… And he goes on to state:
- “Although it is customary to credit the inception of this theory to Charles Darwin and his immediate predecessors, a rudimentary form of this notion can be traced back to the beginnings of written history itself.” i
The writer David Skjaerlund, who has investigated the philosophical roots of the theory of evolution in his book Philosophical Origins of Evolution, states that Empedocles had some interesting ideas; he "believed that chance alone was responsible for the entire process and that man had developed from prior plant life."xxi The concept of chance in ancient religions forms a basic belief and is also the most important idol of the religion of Darwinism.
The French evolutionist Comte de Buffon was one of the most well-known scientists of the 18th century. For more than fifty years he was the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Paris. Darwin based much of his theory on his works. In his 44-volume work Histoire Naturelle, it is possible to find most of the elements that Darwin was to use.