Nature, in all
pre-scientific cults, was regarded as the mysterious incorporation of divine
acts, interpreted in an accidental manner. At an early stage, animism stipulated
that each form of matter is connected to the next with countless links; later
on, religious notions attributed the creation of the body to the external power
of God. There are times even today where these beliefs still have an impact
on mainstream thought. At an even later stage, presocratic philosophy provided
the crucial leap from religious belief to scientific thought, replacing the
unpredictability of Nature with mechanisms. Anaximander of Miletus was the first
to claim that: "In the beginning, humankind was evolved from creatures of a
different kind. Anaximander of Miletus, 10D (ca. 610 - 545 B.C.E.).
As Stuart A. Kauffman states in his work The origins of Order: It was not before
1859 that the Evolution theory of Charles Darwin destroyed the idea of fixed
species, [and] simultaneously swept away the impetus to seek ahistorical laws
of organic form. "The Origin of Species" theory eliminated the boundaries between
animals and humans, we consider ourselves as complex dynamic systems, which
operate in parallel ways, ordered by selection. Selection is considered to be
the overwhelming, even the sole, source of order in organisms. The Neo Darwinian
or Modern Synthesis combined the Darwinian theory with genetics (1930-1940)
showing that mutation is the raw material of selection. Nature was considered
to be more important than man up until the period of Enlightenment. Nature was
seen as the ultimate complex system, the place from which all potentiality could
be derived from. Natures complexity and the systematic study of evolutionary
mechanisms leads us to consider organisms as accidents in the evolutionary
process.
