Eh, kind of ‘rediscovered’ more.
Biologist: Gregor Mendel. Monk who discovered the basis for genetics.
Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair.
Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh.
For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be."
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 4.1217-1232 (50 BCE)
Ecologist: Charles Darwin. Discovered the theory of evolution.
In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn’t do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.
For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.
Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now.
- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 5.837-859
Certainly the more modern versions of these ideas had the benefit of the scientific method to help flesh them out and gain traction as opposed to being rejected and forgotten by dogma.
But let’s not be like the ancient Greeks in claiming Pythagoras invented ideas that we now know predated him by millennia. We owe a great deal to the giants on whose shoulders we stand on, but let us not forget the giants who tread the ground well before them and simply didn’t get taken up on the offer of their shoulders.
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Yet I provide no supporting evidence, written and dated or not, thus I am no giant.
Much of Einstein’s work we recognize as monumental were things that could not be proven in his time and were only validated decades later.
The Epicureans may not have had the scientific method available to them, but their focus on observation driven speculation was literally one of the factors that fed into its creation (see the Pulizer winning The Swerve).
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Proved the atoms were arrangements of the four elements, not so much.
Wasn’t the Epicurean position. Lucretius only surmises that there were likely a few handfuls of base forms of indivisible parts and then a multitude of their combinations. In fact, he rejects the elemental view.
And given we jumped the gun on naming ‘atoms’ after the word for indivisible, the closer philosophical parallel to modern concepts is quanta. And in that context, you even have Lucretius claiming that the behaviors of said indivisible parts must have a degree of indeterminate outcomes beyond following static physical laws for there to be free will (long before Bell’s work relating the behavior of quanta to superderminism). He also surmised that light was made up of indivisible parts that were extremely light and moving very, very fast around 2,000 years before Einstein proved the discrete nature of light.
They were right about everything from survival to the fittest, contribution of traits from each parent, the quantization of light, and the indeterminate behaviors of quanta literally thousands of years before these things are proven.
It wasn’t mere happenstance that they ended up being the most correct about the physical world of all the schools of philosophy in antiquity. They had a concrete methodology behind their success, and frankly it’s a methodology that modernity would do well to have learned more from.
