Everything is transformed by nature and forced into new paths. One thing dwindles . . . another waxes strong. In those days, many species must have died out altogether and failed to multiply. Every species that you now see drawing the breath of life has been preserved from the beginning of the world by cunning, prowess, or speed.
Nearly 2,000 years before Darwin would write Origin of Species, a Roman poet suggested that the organisms best suited to their environment prevailed — and also described extinction. That poet was Lucretius.
Little is known about Lucretius, except that the philosopher-poet likely lived from about 95 to 50 BC, and was a follower of the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who had lived a few centuries earlier. Epicureanism discouraged superstition and any belief in divine intervention. For his part, Lucretius maintained that there were gods, but those gods had no real influence in human affairs and certainly had not created the world for us. The Epicurean philosophy aimed for a state of tranquility and freedom from fear, particularly the fear of death.
Considered anything but a hero by early Christians, Lucretius acquired the reputation of a loser who, driven mad by a love potion, took his own life. Modern scholars reject this story as a fabrication, but agree with the early account on one detail: Lucretius likely died before completing his epic poem, leaving it to be edited after his death by Cicero.
The poem Lucretius wrote was titled De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things or On the Nature of the Universe). The poem consisted of three pairs of books. The first pair dealt with atoms, the second with the soul, and the third with the cosmos and mortality. Lucretius was part of generation of Latin writers striving to give their language the necessary nuance to deal with Greek ideas, at a time when Greek was the language of learning. Considering Latin became the language of learning for the next 1,600 years, these writers must have been successful.
When Lucretius lived, many of his contemporaries believed myths of monsters and gods who destroyed them, often in acts of vengeance. Instead, Lucretius speculated that, in times past, the earth had seen many large animals that had died out as they ran out of resources. Along the same pragmatic vein, he scorned the notion that lightning bolts were hurled by angry gods at erring humans. Why, Lucretius wondered, didn't powerful gods have better aim? Some bolts allegedly thrown by Zeus, the poet pointed out, hit the god's own temple.
For more information:
The First Fossil Hunters by Adrienne Mayor
The Beginnings of Western Science by David C. Lindberg
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Lucretius (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/)
Galileo's Commandment edited by Edmund Blair Bolles
Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated March 28, 2008