DARWIN'S EVOLVING LEGACY

The Greeks developed -or perhaps only broached- the major fields of philosophy. However, if there is a field of knowledge that is genuinely new, it is that of evolutionism. Before the development of the theory of evolution and regarding humans, only two scenarios were conceivable: that of divine creation and that of natural emergence by some extraordinary natural accident. Since Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique, and especially since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, all knowledge pertaining to life is in debt with the Englishman’s main idea that all life forms come from common ancestors and that they are selected in a hazardous way by nature.