 Lucretius basically came up with the whole theory of Darwinism before Darwin with the theory of survival of the fittest. It's on lines 855 or so. At that time too, many species of animals must have perished and failed to propagate and perpetuate their race for every species at UC breathing. The breath of life has been protected and preserved from the beginning of its existence here by cunning or by courage or by speed. There are also many that survived because of their utility has commended them to our care and committed them to our guardianship. Okay and then read it from 871 and following but those animals... Those animals have nature in doubt with none of these qualities so that they were unable either to be self-supporting or to render us any useful service and return for which we might allow their kind to have. Sustainance and security under our protection were of course an easy prey and price for others. Shopwood as they all were, by the bones of their own destiny until nature brought their species to the sea. Okay now I'm just going to make more precise and clear the comment he made. So you said this is really striking how this seems to anticipate Darwinism. But the problem is Darwinism means a lot of different things and this passage doesn't capture all of them. So which aspects of Darwinian theory of evolution does this capture and which parts does it not? The things I feel like it captures is the theory of survival of the fittest and of investigation how humans, some animals that in the wild would not survive because of their own nature. They have survived because of our intervention. Okay so that is a distinction that Darwin makes in the first chapter of Origin the Species between artificial selection and natural selection. Artificial selection is like I'm choosing a pig that has these qualities or a cow that has these qualities and I'm propagating the future, I'm propagating descendants of that according to those qualities I want to preserve. So there's a mind there that's influencing what qualities. If you're choosing it for a big cow then you're mating big cows with big cows and then their descendants end up bigger and you keep doing that and then you'll end up with bigger and bigger ones right? Okay that's called artificial selection and it's important to distinguish between that and natural selection where some sort of similar process is happening but not because a mind like a farmer or a husband or a stockman or whatever is making the selections. So artificial selection and natural selection, that distinction is present here you're right in an incredibly vivid way and this goes wavy on Aristotle who doesn't make this distinction and so on. Okay now you called it survival of the fittest and so that's actually a principle of natural selection and how that works is by a theory of extinctions. Some animals that aren't fit don't survive and therefore don't propagate their genetics into the next generation. And so it also recognizes the phenomenon of extinction. Okay which again Aristotle does, Aristotle for example, and Aristotle's biology was influential a lot longer than Lucretius you know into the basically 17th century biology or something and the idea is that animal species are eternal and they'll always be created and people didn't realize that species can go extinct. In fact it's very very recently that we've realized that species can go extinct and that we've actually driven hundreds of millions of them into extinction and we've now got a new ecological model here based on how many species were driving into extinction. A bunch of them went extinct when this asteroid hit Earth and the dinosaurs went extinct. We're the asteroid now getting the Earth driving as many or more species into extinction now. So that's another momentous thing for him to recognize. Now what of evolutionary theory is not here, is not yet present here? I don't think he goes on to like make any claims that species will like evolve into different species over time and that they'll because of survival of the fish. I don't think he goes that far but that the reason why certain animals exist in his time today was that they were able to survive and I don't think he necessarily means that those species came from the prior species. Yes so that's the crucial point is that he does not have a concept of one species mutating or as we say evolving into another species. So you have to recognize that all of the animals that we see on Earth including human beings are the result of mutants. Mutations is what has created us, not propagation of the same exact form. We're all mutants is why we've been able to survive. Otherwise we look like things did in prehistoric time. And he does not, there is no evidence in here that he has a view that one kind of animal can change into another kind of animal and that is a radical view of the origin of species that Darwin said. It's in fact so insightful that he says it all comes from the same beginning of life, like one beginning of life and then it's just a set of mutations and we aren't the perfect copies that have managed to survive.