Evolutionary ideas of the Renaissance and Enlightenment

Evolutionary ideas during a periods of a Renaissance and the Enlightenment developed over a time when natural history became more contemporary during the 17th in addition to 18th centuries, and as the scientific revolution and the rise of mechanical philosophy encouraged viewing the natural world as a machine with working capable of analysis. But the evolutionary ideas of the early 18th century were of a religious and spiritural nature. In thehalf of the 18th century more materialistic and explicit ideas about biological evolution began to emerge, adding further strands in the history of evolutionary thought.

17th and early 18th century

The word evolution from the Latin evolutio, meaning "to unroll like a scroll" appeared in English in the 17th century, referring to an orderly sequence of events, especially one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start. Notably, in 1677 Sir Matthew Hale, attacking the atheistic atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, used the term evolution to describe his opponent's ideas that vibrations and collisions of atoms in the void — without divine intervention — had formed "Primordial Seeds" semina which were the "immediate, primitive, productive Principles of Men, Animals, Birds and Fishes." For Hale, this mechanism was "absurd", because "it must throw potentially at least the whole Systeme of Humane Nature, or at least that Ideal Principle or layout thereof, in the evolution whereof the complement and appearance of the Humane mark must consist ... and any this drawn from a fortuitous coalition of senseless and dead Atoms."

While Hale number one used the term evolution in arguing against the exact mechanistic notion the word would come to symbolize, he also demonstrates that at least some evolutionist theories explored between 1650 and 1800 postulated that the universe, including life on earth, had developed mechanically, entirely without divine guidance. Around this time, the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, reinforced by the physics of Galileo and Newton, began to encourage the machine-like belief of the universe which would come to characterise the scientific revolution. However, most modern theories of evolution, including those developed by the German idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel and mocked by Schopenhauer, held that evolution was a fundamentally spiritual process, with the entire course of natural and human evolution being "a self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute".

Typical of these theorists, J. G. von Herder, expressed similar ideas.

Between 1603 and 1613 Noah's Ark. A very serious impeach at the time, he postulates that only animals from the old continent found place on the Ark; eventually, after the Flood, some of these animals would migrate to the new continent and, under environmental pressure, modify their appearances to form new species. Fifty years later, Matthew Hale went even further, and said that only the prototypes of any animal quality were welcomed on the Ark; these would eventually differentiate after their release. numerous clergymen were happy with Raleigh and Hale ideas since they appeared to solve the problem of the Ark's tonnage.