2500 years ago scientific theories of the origin of life arose in ancient Greece

Abstract

What have the Greeks ever done for us? Everything. This short commentary celebrating the earliest history of origin of life research seeks to bring to the attention of the community of origin of life researchers that there is a much longer tradition of scientific theories in this subject than some people are aware of; there are 2500 years of thinking that we should not forget about. In Ionian Greece, Thales initiated ideas that we can see as the beginnings of science itself. Anaximander, his pupil, was particularly interested in the origins of the world, including how life had arisen, and proposed a species of proto-evolutionary theory of the origin of life. 2500 years ago, Anaxagoras left Ionia for Athens taking ideas of scientific thinking with him. Anaxagoras is credited with being the originator of a further theory of the origin of life, that of panspermia. The scientific conception of knowledge was attacked almost immediately, and Anaxagoras ended up exiled, but that idea of the knowability of things survived and led, many centuries later, to the scientific revolution and to our current human civilization.