From Robert Hooker to Darwin A Brief History of Mind Reading Notes 10 from The History of Life's Exploration

The authors begin with the Italian physician Francisco Reddy challenging the theory of natural occurrence through experiments (i.e., simple organisms can arise naturally from some kind of inanimate basis). Then our old friend Robert Hooke (who can be seen in the history of physics, chemistry, biology) is also a scientist with a wide range of knowledge. He discovered cells through the microscope, and then he began his microscopic research at the behest of the Royal Society, thus contributing to the foundations of biology, just as he had made to chemistry and physics. In 1665, at the age of 30, Hooke published a book called Micrographs or Small Pictures. The book caused a huge stir because it revealed a strange, new microscopic world through 57 magical illustrations hand-drawn by Hooke. For the first time, they showed humans the structure of fleas, the bodies of lice, the eyes of flies, and the stingers of bees, all magnified into full-page images, some even in folding inserts. Even simple animals have limbs and organs just like we do, which is not only a surprising discovery for a world of insects that have never seen magnification. Later, the textile merchant Leeuwenhoek went one step further and built a microscope 10 times more than hu could use, through which he saw complete creatures that were too small to be seen with the naked eye, a biome that no one was aware of before. He called them "microfauna." Today we call them microbes.

If Hooke and Leeuwenhoek were in a sense Galileo in the field of biology, then Charles Darwin was its Newton. Darwin said that biologists before the advent would also collect data, but did not know how to organically unify them. Although ideas about evolution had emerged before Darwin, most people, including scientists, believed that humans were at the top of a pyramid of many primitive species whose characteristics were fixed and immutable, designed by the Creator, whose ideas we would never understand. Darwin changed that view. If one compares his previous speculations about evolution to a grove of trees, his theory is like a towering tree, a grand sample of rigorous science. For every argument or every piece of evidence provided by his pioneers, he could come up with 100 pieces. More importantly, he discovered the mechanism behind the evolution of species—natural selection—and thus put evolution to the test, to respect its scientific value, to free biology from dependence on God, and to make it a true science, a science rooted in the laws of physics like physics and chemistry.

Exploring the Composition of Matter History of Chemistry A Brief History of Thinking Reading Notes 9