A Brief History of Creation Read online

  Ancient Egyptians confront the plague of frogs.

  For the ancient Egyptians, the emergence of life from nonlife was no more wondrous than a chick’s emergence from an egg. That same belief in a commonplace relationship between life and nonlife shaped the way humans thought about the emergence of the first of things, whether the first chicken, the first owl, or, most important, the first human being. People found the explanation all around them, in all the eggless and parentless creatures they saw in their world.

  The creation stories of most religions are remarkably similar in this regard. In the beginning, there is nothing, or at least something close to nothing. For the Hindus, it was an unknowable chaos; for the Chinese, a formless Dao. The Egyptians believed, understandably, that the universe began with only a mass of water, called Nu, which was surrounded by darkness. These formless beginnings are typically followed by a divine process of creation, culminating in the appearance of human beings, often from a natural substance that makes some cultural sense. In Egypt, the original god, Atum, spawned the rest of the gods by masturbating, or, in some versions, making love to his shadow, which earned him the title “the great He-She.” Finally, from the god Ra’s tears, human beings emerged—in other words, from water, just like the frogs. For the Norse, the first humans were forged from ice. The Mayans believed human beings emerged from wet clay, as did the ancient Assyrians. In the book of Genesis, “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground.” All of these accounts must have seemed reasonable to their creators. If a frog could simply be brought to life from something like water, why couldn’t a human being?

  It would be wrong to see these creation myths as merely stories. They reflected the laws of nature as observed by the peoples who adopted them. There is a reason the Norse saw importance in ice, while the desert-dwelling Egyptians centered their story on water. The problem with these accounts is that they were an end unto themselves. They were unchallengeable. As knowledge of the world grew, such answers could not change.

  But there was another way of approaching the question, another way of approaching all questions. This method did not seek to produce an answer, but to produce a conjecture, a hypothesis. This was not truth, but a seed of truth that would, subjected to scrutiny and critical thinking, bloom into a better understanding of the questions that humankind sought to answer. It assumed no role for a divine creator and was based solely on careful observation and deduction. Eventually, experimentation would be added to that list, but this was very early in the history of what we would now call science.

  IN THE SIXTH CENTURY BC, about two hundred years after the Iliad was composed by the blind poet Homer, the earth shook along the Taygetos mountain range that rimmed the Greek city of Sparta. It was an earthquake so massive that, according to the Roman historian Cicero, one peak was “torn away like the stern of a ship in a storm,” crushing the city below and leaving it in ruins. The Spartans themselves, however, were not harmed. In Cicero’s account, they had spent the night in the fields of the valley below after being warned by a philosopher who had come from the Anatolian city of Miletus. His name was Anaximander.

  The story of Anaximander saving Sparta is almost certainly just a legend. A different account places Anaximander in Sparta setting up a gnomon, a metal rod that served as an early sundial, and makes no mention of the earthquake.* To most ancient Greeks, both stories would have been equally credible. For them, the leap from keeping time to predicting an earthquake wasn’t such a huge one. Both must have seemed like magic, just as reading and writing would seem like magic to peoples that didn’t possess the technology.

  Anaximander was born at an auspicious time in an auspicious place. By the year of his birth in 611 BC, the Greek city of Miletus had become, for a brief spell, one of the greatest city-states in one of the world’s greatest empires. Miletus was ideally situated for trade, located on the coast of the southwest corner of the Anatolian peninsula in modern-day Turkey, and near the mouth of the river Maeander, with so many twists and turns that it spawned the word “meander.” The Miletians were sailors of considerable renown, and the city’s harbor on the Aegean Sea was always full of trading ships picking up wine and olive oil extracted from the fertile groves that dotted the countryside, or delivering shipments of a Phoenician sea snail called murex. From the murex, the Greeks extracted a valuable purple dye worth its weight in silver. As many as 12,000 snails could be used to produce a single garment. Murex-dyed cloth became associated with wealth, and the color purple became synonymous with royalty. The wealth of Miletus was legendary. The Greek historian Herodotus dubbed the city “the Jewel of Ionia.”

  Miletus was also a regional military power, with as many as ninety colonies of its own. Anaximander himself was sometimes described as the leader of a colony on the Black Sea. But the reason the city is still remembered has nothing to do with its money or soldiers: Miletus was the birthplace of Greek philosophy.

  It was the home of the philosopher Thales, a contemporary of Anaximander and probably his mentor. Thales is remembered as the first of the Greek philosophers, which is true, and the world’s first mathematician, which is not. He was also the first individual known to be credited with a mathematical discovery, that of trigonometry. In reality, trigonometry probably originated in Egypt, where, as a young man, Thales had studied the pyramids while receiving instruction in Egyptian theology.

  The Greeks have always received a lot of credit for things that began with other cultures, especially those in their immediate vicinity, like the Egyptians and, even more commonly, the Babylonians. The Babylonians were, as far as we can tell, the first to really take note of the world around them, recording their observations on reddish-hued clay tablets that they baked in the sun on the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates. They were the first to keep track of time, observing, carefully and systematically, phenomena like the speed of the sun as it bounded from horizon to horizon. They categorized all manner of heavenly events, and made huge strides in mathematics. Just as our numeric system revolves around the number 10, the Babylonians’ central figure was 60, which is why we think of time in units of 60, as in 60 seconds in a minute or 60 minutes in an hour. The term “science,” referring to a systematic practice of solving questions, wouldn’t be coined until much later. Identifying its beginning is tricky. But one could do worse than to trace its origins to the Babylonians. A stronger case can be made for them than for the Greeks.

  The Babylonians were the true inventors of the sundial, something for which Europeans would long credit Anaximander. And though Anaximander has often been called the first mapmaker, the Babylonians had already done that too, as had many other cultures. Anaximander was, at one time or another, probably falsely credited with as many inventions as any man in history. Yet he probably justly received credit for one important invention, one that would ensure he would be remembered long after all his contemporaries. Anaximander was, as far as we can tell, the first to write his thoughts down in prose in something we would call a book. He titled it On Nature.

  On Nature was an attempt to create a total cosmology of the universe, from beginning to end. Others of Anaximander’s contemporaries had imagined such cosmologies. His mentor, Thales, had a cosmology of sorts. But Thales’s worldview wasn’t very different from that of his countrymen. According to Thales, in the beginning there was water. The concept was something like that of Nu in Egypt, a country that Thales had visited and studied in. Thales’s vision was rooted partially in observation: there is a lot of water on Earth, living things are largely composed of water, and water has the power to transform matter, such as dirt into mud. Thales believed that all things were formed of water, that it was the essence of all matter. For this, he has long been credited as the first to identify what a chemist would call an “element,” a substance that cannot be broken down into components and that forms the building blocks of more complex forms. Though we now know that water can be broken down further into the elements hydrogen and oxygen, it was a p
erceptive observation.†

  Yet Thales’s cosmology was anchored in the divine, with soul-like mystical forces that brought things to life. Anaximander’s universe was different. It was rooted entirely in things he could see, and he had never seen a soul. There was no room for the mystical or the supernatural. Anaximander’s universe was like a machine that could run on its own.

  Anaximander sought answers about things he could physically see, the things he could truly understand. He set his sights on the sun, the stars, the Earth, and its creatures. Everything in nature, he believed, could be explained in terms of four basic elements: earth, wind, fire, and water. He supposed the sun to be twenty-eight times as big as the Earth. The real figure is about five hundred thousand times larger, but at the time it was remarkable even to recognize the sun as the larger body, given how small it appears in the sky. Anaximander thought the Earth was curved, and shaped like a stone column. The stars, he believed, traveled in great circles around the Earth. It was from this deduction that he made his most revolutionary observation of all: If the stars traveled around the Earth, then it would follow that the Earth was floating freely in space. There was nothing underneath it—a fact that would have been unimaginable to most people for the majority of human history. Even though Anaximander’s conceptions were often crude, in many ways he understood the natural world at least roughly as well as any human being over the next two thousand years.

  Anaximander’s explanations of the development of life on Earth were just as prescient as his observations of the heavens, even if he was a little vague about how the world began. His universe began filled with a kind of infinite nothingness that he called apeiron. Gradually, the basic elements—earth, wind, fire, and water—took shape, and they began to combine to form new things. Eventually, the first plants and animals rose out of the mud where the sea meets the land. These first life-forms were initially enclosed in something like floating tree bark, which drifted until the tides carried them to the shore. Marooned, they dried in the heat of the sun, became brittle, and cracked open, setting free the creatures and plants they contained.

  In Anaximander’s scheme, human beings were among the first creatures to appear on the Earth, emerging out of the mouths of fishlike beasts that crawled onto the beaches, like butterflies from cocoons. In a sense, they evolved, and his narrative resembled one that might be given by a child of the twenty-first century asked to describe the process of evolution.

  Anaximander must have thought the question of the origin of life rather simple. Unlike the sun, which he couldn’t measure, or the stars, whose trajectory he could but guess, Anaximander could see living things appearing out of nonliving things. It was simply a change of form of the natural elements, like wood turning to fire, or fire to smoke. Yet he never gave the phenomenon a name. That would be done by one of Anaximander’s intellectual inheritors, Aristotle.

  ONLY TWO ENIGMATIC SENTENCES of Anaximander’s writing survive in the form in which they were originally written: “All things originate from one another, and vanish into one another according to necessity. They give to each other justice and recompense for injustice, in conformity with the order of Time.” The fragment from On Nature was saved by the Greek philosopher Simplicius and included as a quotation in his commentary on Aristotle’s great work, Physics. Everything else we know about what Anaximander believed comes secondhand from references by the many learned Greeks who read his words, particularly in the work of Theophrastus, one of Aristotle’s most important contemporaries.

  More than two hundred years after Anaximander’s death, Theophrastus likely familiarized himself with On Nature in Aristotle’s library, the Lyceum of Athens. The Lyceum had existed long before Aristotle, but Aristotle transformed it from a gymnasium that trained athletes for the Olympic Games into an academy for training the greatest young minds of his generation. Would-be philosophers flocked to Athens to the court of Greece’s preeminent intellect, a position Aristotle inherited from his Athenian teacher, Plato. Just as Aristotle had been a student of one of history’s most accomplished thinkers, he, in turn, became tutor to one of history’s greatest conquerors, Alexander the Great. And as Alexander’s conquests grew, so did the splendor of Aristotle’s Lyceum. In addition to his famous library, Aristotle built a botanical garden and a zoo filled with animals from faraway lands, sent back by Alexander from the lands he had conquered.

  Aristotle’s rise to his position as Plato’s intellectual heir was roundabout, and owed much to politics. The most complicated part was that he was not a Greek at all. When he was only eighteen, Aristotle had come to Plato’s Academy from Macedonia, where his father was the court physician to the king, Alexander’s grandfather. Aristotle’s brilliance was obvious, yet when Plato died twenty years later, Aristotle entered a self-imposed exile. Macedonian armies were snatching up Greek cities one by one, and anti-Macedonian feelings ran deep in Athens. Aristotle’s heritage had by then become a liability.

  Aristotle left Athens for the Anatolian Greek city of Assos, just north of Miletus. Eventually, he ended up on the island of Lesbos in the Aegean Sea, where he was met by a friend from his days at Plato’s Academy: Theophrastus. Theophrastus was a native of Lesbos. His given name was Tyrtamus. Because of his eloquence, Aristotle had given him the nickname by which he would later be remembered: Theophrastus, meaning “one who speaks like a god.” Like Aristotle, Theophrastus had wide-ranging interests, but he devoted most of his time to studying the natural world, and botany in particular. Theophrastus wrote two important books on the subject: Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants. He would become widely recognized as antiquity’s greatest authority on flora.

  Aristotle’s interests were more deeply rooted in the animal kingdom. Teeming with all kinds of animal life, shaped by centuries of unique evolution, Lesbos must have been, for Aristotle, a little like the Galápagos would later be for Darwin: an isolated ecosystem that provided the perfect microcosm for studying the mechanisms of nature. Just as the Galápagos would provide the observational framework for On the Origin of Species, Lesbos was Aristotle’s inspiration for three volumes of naturalism that would eventually secure his place as the founder of biology.

  Of all Aristotle’s works in what would one day be called the sciences—mathematics, geology, physics—none had more of a lasting impact than his biological observations. Even though he made some serious mistakes—he believed, for instance, that women had more teeth than men—he was still such a keen observer and careful cataloger that nearly two millennia later, learned men could still read his works, not merely as quaint antiquated musings, but as exemplars of the world’s finest naturalistic thought right up until the Renaissance. The Europeans of the next two thousand years looked at his observations in much the same way they looked at the colossal buildings of the Romans—in wonderment at the lost knowledge that had built the things that they, the inheritors, could not.

  In his seminal book History of Animals, Aristotle laid out a vision of the animal world not unlike the “tree of life” that would one day be constructed by evolutionists, with long rows of species gradually evolving into humans. Had Aristotle made such a drawing, his animal kingdom would have looked much the same, with each species differing only slightly from those at either side. But Aristotle believed—as his master Plato had believed—that species, like the universe they inhabited, did not change. Nature was perfect. By all rights, Aristotle, armed with his catalog of natural observations, should have been the first evolutionist. Yet even with his ample evidence, he never guessed at the answer that many of his fellow philosophers—most famously Lucretius and Epicurus—stumbled upon.

  Still, Aristotle shared the belief held by Anaximander and most others that life could naturally arise from nonlife. Just as Aristotle found plants such as mosses that could propagate without seeds, he also found animals and insects that did the same. He called the process “spontaneous generation,” a phrase he first used in History of Animals:

  Now there
is one property that animals are found to have in common with plants. For some plants are generated from the seed of plants, whilst other plants are self-generated through the formation of some elemental principle similar to a seed. . . . So with animals, some spring from parent animals according to their kind, whilst others grow spontaneously and not from kindred stock; and of these instances of spontaneous generation some come from putrefying earth or vegetable matter, as is the case with a number of insects, while others are spontaneously generated in the inside of animals out of the secretions of their several organs.

  Of all the writings by Greek philosophers about spontaneous generation, Aristotle’s concept was the one that would be most remembered. As the Greek world gave way to the Roman, and the Roman to the Christian, Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation was kept alive in the works of one of the most influential Christian thinkers of all time.

  IN THE YEAR AD 415, a mob of Egyptian Christians dragged a woman named Hypatia from her home, stripped her naked, and paraded her through the streets of Alexandria before finally beating her to death with tiles. Hypatia was a mathematician who taught classical theories to anyone who would receive them, whether Christian or pagan. She identified herself as a Neoplatonist, adherent to a revivalist movement centered around classical Greek philosophy. Her public stoning was the result of an uprising against what the mob felt were irreligious actions taken by the city’s prefect, Orestes. The seventh-century bishop John of Nikiû later explained that Hypatia “was devoted at all times to magic, astrolabes and instruments of music and she beguiled many people with her Satanic wiles.” For modern chroniclers of the early church, the death of Hypatia would come to be seen as a turning point when people in the Western world began to question the wisdom and learning of the Greeks.