Episode 074 - Eclipses, And The Beginnings of Life on Earth
Date: 06/09/21
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2045-episode-seventy-four-eclipses-and-the-beginnings-of-life-on-earth/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Don reads Book Five lines 705–820, covering the moon possibly being created anew each month (the Berossean rotating-hemisphere theory), a poetic procession of the seasons (Venus, Flora, Bacchus), multiple possible causes for solar and lunar eclipses, and the new-formed earth producing herbs, trees, birds from eggs, and early humans and animals from womb-like pouches in the soil. Don follows up from Episode 073 on the Babylonian astronomer Berossus: per Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom, Berossus is the latest philosopher identifiable by name in the poem, confirmed by ancient commentators Aetius and Cleomedes.
The panel discusses the Letter to Pythocles sections 86–87 at length: Epicurus draws a sharp methodological divide between terrestrial physics (where firm deductive conclusions are reached, including atoms and void) and celestial phenomena (where multiple plausible explanations must be accepted without forcing a single answer). Don and Cassius work through the distinction between deduction and induction. Martin draws a modern parallel to Lucretius’s account of life arising from the earth: abiogenesis — protocells forming under the right conditions of water, temperature, organic molecules, and fatty membranes — is analogous to what Lucretius describes, but only for the simplest primitive forms, not for the complex life he also depicts.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius:
Welcome to Episode 74 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com Forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’ poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Norman DeWitt. For anyone who is not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode 1 for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about those, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In this episode 74, we’ll read approximately Latin lines 705 through 820 from Book 5. We’ll talk about the initial phases of life on Earth. Now let’s join Don reading today’s text.
Don:
Lastly, why may not a moon be created new every day and be distinguished by regular phases in certain forms of light? Can this new orb die and be succeeded the next day by another that should supply its place in the same part and quarter of the heavens? It is difficult to assign a reason and to prove the contrary, especially since we observe so many things are formed and succeed one another in regular order.
And first the spring begins and Venus enters with her harbingers, the winged Zephyrs, marching by her side. Then Mother Flora spreads the way before with flowers of richest dye and fills the air with sweetest odors. And next advance the scorching summer and her companion the dusty harvest and the keen blasts of northern winds. And then comes autumn and jolly Bacchus steps along. Now follow ruffling storms and boisterous winds, the roaring southeast and the sultry south full fraught with thunder. At last the cold brings on the snow and chilling frost, and then creeps winter, all benumbed and chattering with his teeth. It is less the wonder then that the moon should be formed anew at certain times and at fixed seasons again expire, since so many things are so regularly produced and succeed one another.
The eclipses of the sun and moon may proceed, you may suppose, from many causes. For why should the moon deprive the earth of the sun’s light, and as she shines above oppose her body to him and stop his burning rays by thrusting her dark orb between, and not another body wholly dark be thought to interpose at such a time and produce the same effect? And why may not the sun grow faint and deaden his light at certain times, and renew it again when he has passed certain regions of the air that are enemies to his beams, and destroy and extinguish his fires? And then again, while the moon in her monthly course passes by the rigid shadow of the earth, which is of a conical shape, why should the earth rob the moon of light, and being above the sun hold his rays shut in? And why may not another body at the same time move below the moon, and pass above the body of the sun, that may intercept his rays and stop his spreading fires? And yet, if the moon be allowed to shine with her own beams, why may not her brightness decay in certain parts of the world, as she passes through places that are enemies to her light?
And now, since I have explained from what causes precede the motions of all the celestial bodies, and given you a rule to know what force, what power drives on the various courses of the sun, and the wanderings of the moon, and in what manner their several rays are intercepted, and the earth is covered over with surprising darkness as if they winked, and how again they spread open their beams and visit the world with shining light, I now return to the new formed earth and her tender soil, to find what kind of beings she first raised into the light, what offspring she first ventured to commit to the faithless winds.
And first, the earth produced the herbs and spread a green mantle over all the hills, and the gaudy fields shone all around with green, and nature gave the several trees a power to raise themselves and grow up with their spreading branches into the air. As feathers and hair and bristles were at first produced by the limbs of beasts and the bodies of birds, so the new earth first bore the herbs and the trees. And then she formed many kinds of living creatures for various ends and after a different manner. For the race of animals did not originally fall down from the skies, nor could terrestrial beings rise out of the salt sea; and therefore we say that the earth justly obtained the name of Mother, because out of her all things were formed.
Even now many animals rise from the earth and are produced by moisture in the heat of the sun, and therefore the wonder is the less that many more should have been created in the beginning of the world and of a larger size, when the earth was fresh as a young bride and her husband Ether in the flower of his age. Of all the animal creation, the feathered kind and various breeds of birds first broke through the prison of the egg in time of spring, as grasshoppers in the summer now burst their curious little bags and of themselves know how to seek their food and preserve their life. The earth next produced the race of men and beasts, and then there was abundance of vital heat and moisture in the soil, and where the place was proper, a sort of womb grew up, fixed and sticking in the earth by their roots. These the infants ripe for birth broke through; they left their moist enclosure and sprung out into the air. In those places nature prepared the pores of the earth and forced her to pour from her open veins a liquor like milk, as a woman after delivery is full of sweet milk because the principal juices of her food fly into her breasts. The earth gives nourishment to the infant, the warmth of the sun is instead of clothes, and the grass abounding with plenty of soft down affords the bed.
But this new world produced no chilling cold, nor too much heat, nor force of rushing winds, for things increased and grew violent by degrees. And therefore by the strictest laws of justice does the earth claim the name of mother, because in this manner for some time she herself produced mankind, and formed every savage beast that wildly roars upon the mountaintops, and the great variety of birds distinguished by the beauty of their feathers.
Cassius:
Don, thank you for reading that this morning. This is a continuation and a little bit of a transition — we’re finally going to move past some of the astronomical observations into the formation and early history of the earth. But I think before we got started recording today, you mentioned you might have something to go back and discuss from last week before we get too far into this week.
Don:
Yeah, I thought it was interesting. I went and put some notes on the forum about the whole Babylonian and Chaldean astronomy stuff that Lucretius was talking about, and that Brown’s translation uses the name Berossus. I was a little disappointed that Berossus wasn’t mentioned by name in the text itself. So I went back and looked at David Sedley’s Lucretius and the Transformation of Greek Wisdom to see if he said anything about the sections we’re going over.
And sure enough, he has a section on Berossus. I found that it’s not that Lucretius mentions him, but it’s a fact that some commentators from ancient times mentioned Berossus. So if you’ll indulge me, it’s easier for me just to read the section here instead of trying to paraphrase Sedley. He says:
“If the question is posed, who is the latest philosopher or scientist to whom Lucretius unambiguously refers, the answer must be Berossus, the Babylonian historian, astrologer, and astronomer. The idiosyncratic theory about the moon, which Lucretius considers sympathetically — that it has one bright hemisphere and rotates — is there called the Babylonian doctrine of the Chaldeans, and our sources inform us that the Babylonian in question was Berossus.”
And then he goes on to say Berossus’s biography is problematic — it’s not even universally agreed that the astronomer and the historian were the same person. So there might actually have been two men named Berossus. His work, the Babyloniaca, was dedicated to Antiochus I Soter, who reigned from 281 to 262 BC. But this may have been late in Berossus’s life. There’s no good reason to think that his astronomical theories were to be found in his historical treatise, or that he had never aired them before writing this very late work. In short, there’s no obstacle to assuming that his theory about the moon could have been familiar to Epicurus at the end of the fourth century.
So Sedley says that’s the latest philosopher they can pinpoint by name as mentioned in the poem. And it’s very possible that Epicurus was referring back to Berossus and his Babylonian astronomical ideas in the volumes of On Nature as well.
Cassius:
That is interesting. So how many years before Epicurus lived did Berossus and these Chaldeans have their theory?
Don:
It looks like the Babyloniaca was dedicated to the emperor who reigned from 281 to 262 BC — so not very far. That’s the latest work Berossus wrote. So he could actually have written earlier works that are lost to us that would have been available to Epicurus as well.
I was a little disappointed when I looked at the translations and posted the notes — I thought, oh, Berossus isn’t there in the main text. But he is sort of mentioned in a way afterwards, in that evidently people who commented on the poem knew who Lucretius was talking about.
Cassius:
It is fascinating in itself just to look at the different translations and compare what different commentators come up with. Because when you posted that comment about Berossus not being in the Brown translation, I was reading the Watson version that Joshua of our group posted about — and Watson had criticized the Brown edition as lacking brilliance or flash or something like that. And so when I read this, I thought, oh my gosh, this is another example of the Brown translation coming up with something unusual. But it sounds like it’s actually a fairly perceptive comment to throw in there. Probably not a great idea to add something to the text, but in this case, maybe an intelligent addition.
Don:
Exactly. And the two commentators that Sedley mentions who brought up Berossus were Aetius — A-E-T-I-U-S — and Cleomedes. So there are evidently two ancient sources that actually identify the Babylonian astronomer Berossus in connection with this passage.
Cassius:
Well, and this is probably a good time to make the comment that once we’re finished with over a year or two of podcasts, it will finally be time to read Sedley’s book and then kick myself the rest of my life for not having read it before we did the podcast. And it’s not that long either, so it’s a doable thing.
Don:
Well, I don’t know whether I’ve read it start to finish, but there’s a nice index in the back that refers to each individual verse in Lucretius, so you can actually look up the sections you’re interested in and then go to the page numbers. That’s how I found this one on Berossus.
Cassius:
Very interesting. And again — I have tremendous respect for David Sedley’s work, so it’s probably well worth anybody’s time to spend time with that book. I think your recommendation of Sedley is well-founded, and I’ve always found him to be very interesting both in his papers and in the books he’s written.
Okay, so getting back to today’s text — the beginning of it is a reference to the moon and discussing the possibility that the moon could actually somehow reignite itself every thirty days. Is this the Berossean theory or is it something else about the moon?
Don:
The Berossean one, I believe, was the one from last week — he talks about the Berossean theory as being that the moon has one bright hemisphere and then rotates, so you can see one bright and one dark hemisphere. Okay, so dying out would not be the same thing — it’d be the rotation of it, I guess.
Cassius:
And I still have to applaud their ingenuity in coming up with these various things, because they had no idea how the world worked, and they just used their observations. It’s amazing how many different theories you can come up with from seeing the same thing.
Don:
Right. And just like the majority of the latter part of this first paragraph is just going through in a poetic fashion talking about the advance of the seasons. And I believe he does that because he’s talking about there’s no reason to think that, since we have the regular flow of the seasons, you can’t have a regular extinguishment and reemergence of the moon — so if that’s periodic and the seasons are periodic, there’s nothing that rules that idea out from their perspective.
Cassius:
Right, that’s exactly the statement in the last sentence of the paragraph: “It is less the wonder then that the moon should be formed anew since so many things are so regularly produced and succeed one another.”
Don:
And we talked about that last week too — that the reason we have those regular things happening is because that’s the way the universe finally worked itself out. That’s what worked, and that’s why we see the periodic instances happening now.
Cassius:
Right — not because of the guidance of a supernatural god.
Don:
Exactly, exactly.
Cassius:
Okay, and then our second paragraph is talking about eclipses of the sun and moon, asking questions about whether there’s some body in between the planets or what exactly is going on. I don’t know that he comes to a conclusion there about the eclipses — he’s just talking about they may proceed from many causes.
Don:
Right, and he doesn’t have enough information to decide on one, so he’s leaving the options open.
Cassius:
And as you say that, that reminds me of a general point that’s probably worth making again. I’ve been working lately with both the Letter to Herodotus and the Letter to Pythocles, and it kind of interests me that it’s the same division — because Herodotus does talk about the formation of the world and the universe, so he’s dealing to some extent with astronomical issues in Herodotus, but then he devotes a separate special letter to Pythocles to the celestial motions. So there’s obviously a division in Epicurus’s mind between the basic physics of Herodotus versus the stars and the moon and the sun in Pythocles.
What do you guys think about that? What do you think is in his mind in dividing those two like that?
Don:
The thing that comes immediately to my mind is that we probably have so many letters that have been lost — I’m sure that he delved into the details of any number of different phenomena in different letters to different people at different times. We’re just lucky enough to have the letters to Herodotus and Pythocles as examples of him summarizing different points on different phenomena.
Cassius:
Right. I think what’s in my mind is that — if I remember correctly from the letter to Pythocles — he starts out the very beginning of that letter indicating there’s a difference in analysis between things that are in the sky versus things here on earth. I’m gathering that he’s talking about the fact that here on earth we have a lot more information — the ability to get close to something, hold it in our hands, move around it, and gather more detailed data. We do not have that ability regarding things in the sky. And so to some extent there’s an important division between the way he approaches those two subjects, and the way he tells us to reason about things in the sky he’s much more insistent about the alternate possibilities analysis, because he even makes that point: that unlike certain things here on earth — and I think he cites his basic atomism — unlike those things, we have to be much more cautious about choosing between theories in regard to the sky.
Don:
I would agree that that makes sense, because you’re more tied to the things that you can see that are closer to you than things up in the ether and farther up in the air.
Cassius:
Right. And I’m just going to throw this out, but it’s kind of struck me sometimes that it’s interesting — it’s not exactly a matter of caution in making judgments about things that you can’t see, because I believe he can’t see atoms either. When you go downward in scale you’re equally limited in your ability to make direct observations. But it seems like on things here on earth he’s more able and willing to come to a firm conclusion and doesn’t think it’s as necessary to consider the alternate explanations as he does with things in the sky. Which I guess is just another example of the division being an issue of simply how much information do we have. But I thought somebody might easily ask: well, why are you so certain about how the atoms operate? You certainly can’t see them either. So this is a different level of evidence that’s involved. Right, Martin?
Martin:
I’m talking an awful lot — do you have any commentary so far?
Cassius:
No at this point. No problem. Yeah.
Don:
I think you bring up a really good point about the Letter to Pythocles. I pulled it up here on the Perseus Project, and let me just, if I may, read that part — because I think you bring up a really good point.
So, “for in the study of nature we must not conform to empty assumptions and arbitrary laws but follow the promptings of the facts. For our life has no need now of unreason and false opinion; our one need is untroubled existence. All things go on uninterruptedly if all be explained by the method of plurality of causes in conformity with the facts, so soon as we duly understand what may be plausibly alleged respecting them. But when we pick and choose among them, rejecting one equally consistent with the phenomena, we clearly fall away from the study of nature altogether and tumble into myth. Some phenomena within our experience afford evidence by which we may interpret what goes on in the heavens. We see how the former really take place, but not how the celestial phenomena take place, for their occurrence may possibly be due to a variety of causes.”
Cassius:
Yes, that’s exactly the point. Are you looking at a source that tells you what line you started reading on?
Don:
This would have been in Diogenes, section 87 in Book 10.
Cassius:
Yes, 87. Okay, I ask that because I think 86 is also relevant. Let me comment — Bailey’s version says: “We must not try to force an impossible explanation nor employ a method of inquiry like our reasoning either about the modes of life or with respect to the solution of other physical problems.” Did you read that part?
Don:
I have that one here too.
Cassius:
Why don’t you read that one in the Perseus edition, so we’ll have the same text from both editions, because I think that one is also very specifically relevant. That’ll be 86, I think — the one directly preceding the one you just read.
Don:
“We do not seek to rest by force what is impossible, nor to understand all matters equally well, nor make our treatment always as clear as when we discuss human life or explain the principles of physics in general — for instance, that the whole of being consists of bodies and intangible nature, or that the ultimate elements of things are indivisible, or any other proposition which admits only one explanation of the phenomena to be possible. But this is not the case with celestial phenomena. These at any rate admit of manifold causes for their occurrence and manifold accounts, none of them contradictory of sensation of their nature.”
Cassius:
Ah, so that is interesting because he’s saying that the only explanation you can really come to about the universe itself is that there are atoms and void, and that’s the way things have to be to get to where we are today. But whenever you look at the motions of the stars and the motions of the moon, there’s not necessarily one explanation that will show what you’re observing.
Yeah, and I think this is really, really an important issue that he’s dealing with here. It takes us back to a lot of the past discussions we’ve had about the relationship of logic to observation. And the way you’ve said it is exactly accurate — and it’s interesting that your translation is slightly different than what Bailey says.
Now I’m going to ask a question to reveal my ignorance — you used the word “deduction,” so what’s the difference between deduction and induction? We probably ought to look it up to get a good quality definition, because I don’t want to butcher it.
Don:
Deduction versus induction. I’m looking at the Merriam-Webster definition here. Deductive reasoning, or deduction, is making an inference based on widely accepted facts or premises. The example they give is: if a beverage is defined as drinkable through a straw, one could use deduction to determine soup to be a beverage. And then inductive reasoning, or induction, is making an inference based on an observation, often of a sample. You can induce that soup is tasty if you observe all of your friends consuming it. So it looks like you’re starting with a premise in deduction, but you’re making an inference based on observation with induction.
Cassius:
And so maybe the classic example within Epicurean philosophy would be that Epicurus has by observation reached the conclusion that nothing comes from nothing, and he is then willing to take that conclusion — nothing comes from nothing — as a premise against which he is going to test everything else and never admit an exception to it. And that is the issue that in past podcasts Elaine and I have gone back and forth on, and that Frances Wright certainly has an issue with in A Few Days in Athens — she wants to always say we must prove each conclusion at the moment through observation and actually consider that these pre-established conclusions such as “nothing comes from nothing” should not be given the rank of unchallengeable authority. It looks like to me that what he is saying in passages like this is that we can and should reach conclusions such as “nothing comes from nothing” which we are then going to treat as premises for future deductive reasoning.
Don:
Right. And just to bring up again — I know I’ve said this on the forum and stuff — but the fact that it’s not necessarily that he says “nothing comes from nothing,” it’s that nothing comes from that which does not presently exist, basically.
Cassius:
Right, right, and he sometimes inserts “at the will of the gods” as a caveat as well. But you’re right. All of that initial list of items — the “nothing comes from that which does not exist” or “nothing goes to non-existence” — certainly to me seems to be elevating those to things that he is going to now consider to be unchallengeable and thereby usable for deductive reasoning about anything else, including about the existence of supernatural gods.
Don:
Right.
Cassius:
Martin, any comments at this point?
Martin:
You stated it already and even better than everybody else.
Cassius:
Okay. I don’t think it’s possible really to overemphasize the importance of what we’re dealing with here — seeing this distinction — because it’s pretty easy to get lost in just observing that he’s got some funny theories about the moon and the sun, and not even cross over to the issue of: well, why is he so certain about his atomism and his conclusions about things here on earth, but looking at the sky he’s willing to just accept all these different possibilities and say that it’s not even necessary for you to come to a conclusion as long as you’ve got some alternate explanations that make sense and that will give you peace of mind?
I think it does strike a significant number of people as a difference in position that they need to understand. And at least from my perspective, it seems to be that what you’re doing with the sun and the moon and their motions is that you observe something happening and it’s like, well, it could be this or this or this. But with atoms and void, what he’s done is say: what are the competing theories as to what are the basic fundamental principles, and where does that lead? And the only one that he finds that will eventually lead to the universe that we know — at least in his mind — is atoms and void, because that’s the only possible explanation that leads to what we are without introducing supernatural gods or other things that we don’t observe in the universe.
And the reason what rolls through my mind is the competition between: is he really just being a pragmatist, saying that this is so important he just has to reach a conclusion and then irrationally reaching one? Or does he have a systematic approach to it that we can consider more reasonable? And I think the answer is yes, and I think the answer revolves around his canonical and epistemological approach about how much evidence is necessary to reach a firm conclusion. I think he would say: if you think that I concluded there are no supernatural gods because I just wanted that conclusion, that’s an insult. You’re accusing me of putting my finger on the scales. And I think Epicurus would consider that to be an insult. I think he would say that he has been rigorously scientific, rigorously logical, rigorously reasonable in his analysis, and when you follow observation, reason, and logic — put them all together and handle it as absolutely objectively and fairly as you possibly can — it is possible and in fact compelled by that analysis to come to certain conclusions, including that the universe is not created by a supernatural god.
Don:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Cassius:
So again, to wrap up this section of our discussion — it’s not just that he decided to write one book about general physics and then thought that celestial observations were so interesting that he wanted a separate book on them. I think he saw a very important distinction in the way you approach those two subjects. And the really important thing for us is not only his conclusion but understanding why he saw them as requiring a different process of analysis, so that we can potentially apply that same kind of process to our own questions.
Okay, where were we?
Don:
To just briefly go back to Sedley — I think one of the most interesting things Sedley does is try to reconstruct the content of all 37 volumes of Epicurus’s On Nature and how it lines up to Lucretius’s poem. It just shows the breadth and depth of Epicurus’s investigation into these things.
Cassius:
Well, once again you’re whetting my appetite to get to it, so hopefully I’ll succeed. Okay, so if we move on in the text for today — he says that now that he’s explained the causes of the motions of the celestial bodies, he returns to “the new formed earth and her tender soil, to find what kind of beings she first raised into the light, what offspring she first ventured to commit to the faithless winds.” So I think we have a major transition. We’ve had a series of podcasts on celestial motions for the last several weeks, and now we’re going to turn to what some people are going to find a lot more interesting — his discussion of the early days of the earth and how life was formed on it.
Any preliminary comments before we do that? You know, one thing — and maybe this is just poetical on his part — but it always strikes me that his use of “what kind of beings she first raised into the light.” It seems to me that in Lucretius there’s a series of analogies like that about coming to the light or being raised into the light. There’s the “shores of light” that appears earlier in Lucretius, and I’ve always thought there must be some significance in Epicurus’s mind to this analogy, though I don’t know exactly what it would be. Don, do you have any thought? Martin?
Don:
The only thing that comes to my mind is that one of the hallmarks of being alive is opening your eyes for the first time and seeing light and the world. So maybe that’s part of it. But I certainly wouldn’t want to put words in his mouth.
Cassius:
I think that’s pretty good speculation — that light is something that, if you open your eyes and see light first thing in the morning, or even if someone happens to be blind, you can still feel the heat of the sun and the warmth. It’s just part of being alive. It’s kind of like life is the threshold at which you first perceive that light exists — you’re entering a new level of experience.
Don:
If we take the whole idea of the creation story in Genesis, I mean, the first thing was that light was the first thing created. So there has to be some sort of overall idea in the ancient world that light has that fundamental property of life and creation. And of course being in opposition to darkness is just a very obvious poetical analogy. But I do notice that it appears in the physics discussions in ways I would not necessarily have expected.
Cassius:
I will say, going back to the text we covered itself — his whole idea of the way things evolved and animals coming up from the ground is quite creative, but we went off the rails a little there as far as the history of the world. But I find it extremely entertaining to read.
Don:
Yeah. And of course what you’re talking about is our last passage for today about the earth producing the herbs and then the whole rest of what we have — I mean, he’s really discussing the earth as if humans and beasts to some degree rose fully formed from the earth.
Cassius:
Exactly. And if you were trying to support that analogy with something — I think, and I think he does say it, that we still see worms come up from the earth after the rain. Perhaps he thought that was an analogy — if the earth can produce a worm or bug seemingly out of what appears to be just dirt, then why can’t it produce an elephant? And he addresses that too — he says well, now the only thing we see come up out of the moisture in the earth are the worms, so we’ve obviously degraded from where we were originally. But if you go back to the beginning of the world, the earth was so much more fertile, and it could produce entire animals — and that’s how we got started. He’s using his observation of the worms as the starting point and saying, well, there was a golden age when everything was possible and the earth could produce all kinds of animals and beasts and humans.
Don:
Yes, he’s saying that “earlier on many more should have been created in the beginning of the world and of a larger size when the earth was fresh as a young bride and her husband Ether in the flower of his age.”
Cassius:
So I want to bring Martin in here, because now we’re going to be starting to talk about elemental theory that we would compare to what we look at today in terms of evolution. This is clearly not evolution in the way we see it, because these things are coming up fully formed. But I believe next week he does say that the earth produced all sorts of things that did not survive, and that would indicate the potential for natural selection. But at least right now the core observation is that pretty much fully formed things are coming from the earth. Martin, where do you want to jump in on evolution or natural selection or the formation of life?
Martin:
First let me go back to this “coming to light.” I see it the opposite way around — it’s like when a plant grows from a seed underground, then it breaks through the soil and then we can actually see it, because it hits the light and people can see it. That’s how I see the reference to the light.
Cassius:
Well, that’s not far from what I’m thinking too — because you’re talking about “people can see it” as the important part. Is that what you’re saying?
Martin:
Yes. But from what was discussed before, it’s rather that what is born can see. I think it’s rather that we can see what is born — that’s what is important.
Cassius:
Ah, I see your distinction. Yeah, yeah.
Don:
I like the way Martin phrased that too, especially in light of the section we’re reading now about life actually coming from underground — the analogy to seeds and everything is right there.
Cassius:
Yeah. Okay, let me throw this in there, because I think it has to be related back — and it’s in Book One — about the fact that there are sort of two categories: there’s the elemental particles that have properties, and then there’s the bodies which have these emergent qualities. And I guess that’s kind of where I’m going with this — maybe the “shores of light” issue is an analogy to this being the world of emergent qualities. Because until you get to this point, everything is just basically an elemental particle floating through the air. But when you bring things together and you have all of this stuff that starts to happen as a result, you’re really in a different level of experience — the world of seeing things and experiencing life as an emergent qualities world, as opposed to just the individual elemental particles floating around among themselves.
And Martin, are you going to go further?
Martin:
Yeah. Now comes this last paragraph and I think this spontaneous generation thing traces back as far as Aristotle. So here it seems he basically just takes that as consistent with his own theory and reproduces it. And if you talk about spontaneous genesis of all the higher developed species, then this is pretty much against what is often argued — that Lucretius anticipated evolution. I don’t think I still see that. Maybe it will come in the future text. But if I see here the proposition of spontaneous genesis for higher developed life, then this doesn’t really make sense alongside proposing evolution. And the other thing — I forgot that one, okay, I’ll come back later.
Cassius:
Well, on what you just said, Martin — I agree with you. I do think that there is a fundamental conflict at a very root level between what he is saying versus what we as laymen think of as the current theory of evolution. So I find this fascinating because exploring the difference leads in all sorts of interesting directions. Don, what are your thoughts?
Don:
Oh yeah. I think between this and — I don’t even know how you want to describe it. What word should we use? Is it Darwinian evolution as the general theory? I would say spontaneous generation versus Darwinian evolution is what we’re going to be looking at.
As another word — and this might be a tangent — I’ve been reading about this on Wikipedia. There’s another word, “saltation,” or “leaping,” and there is apparently a line of thought that goes back a long ways that instead of there being incremental adjustments due to natural selection, there are leaps. The one that came up with that is punctuated equilibrium. Yeah, punctuations, or leaping, whatever. Anyway, I don’t even want to go down that road, but I do think as we read all this we’ll get a lot more out of it if we think about not only how it might be a precursor to our current viewpoint, but how in fact it might even continue to conflict with it — and whether the conflict might actually be educational for us today.
Cassius:
One of the things that come to mind too is that this analogy — and we’ll talk more about it next week — is that the earth brought up all of these different kinds of options for animals, and some of them survived and some of them didn’t. And I think there’s an analogy between that and what we were talking about earlier — that the universe tried a lot of different options for the way things were going to go and finally settled on the periodic motions of the sun and moon and so forth. There’s an analogy between that kind of thing and the idea that the earth came up with myriads of different kinds of animals, but only the things we see now are the things that actually worked out.
Don:
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. Of course, when you use words like “the universe tried different things and then it settled,” there’s the implication of an intelligence that I think is not in the theory here. But it’s just the way we use those words — it’s almost inevitable.
Cassius:
It’s so hard to talk about things like that without using that anthropomorphic language.
And I want to add here at this point too — I would strongly believe that this process that he’s describing in this paragraph, and what we’ll continue for a while in upcoming podcasts, I’m convinced that he would say that exactly this process has gone on an indefinite or even infinite number of times in other locations, in other parts of the universe. So he’s not presuming that this is some one-of-a-kind accidental thing. He is presuming this is just the natural order of things throughout the universe. I think that leads in different directions than what a lot of laymen would think — we tend to think of this as unusual and accidental, and just what a miracle it’s happened once. But I think the Epicurean perspective would have been that this is just the natural order of things, and our earth has gotten old and doesn’t do it anymore, but it’s just going to be replaced by a younger one at some point in time, and not only here but in basically an infinite number of places throughout the universe.
Don:
You could almost say that it’s just the nature of things.
Cassius:
Or “the way things are,” you could say. Yes. Martin, we’re probably beginning to run long, so let’s talk about closing thoughts for the day. Anybody have any new subjects to bring up before we start to wind down?
Don:
Nope.
Cassius:
Okay. Don’s always probably the best for a new subject, so Martin, do you have any closing thoughts?
Martin:
Yeah. I remember the last thing I wanted to mention. With a materialistic worldview, eventually life must have been formed from something that was abiotic. But the word “spontaneous generation” is not used for that even though we have a variety of detailed scenarios for how this might have happened. This just refers to single-cell organisms, or precursors of single-cell organisms — very primitive ones. So anything which is more developed would no longer be produced by spontaneous generation, but rather by the reproduction of these primary cells, which were formed under the suitable conditions.
Cassius:
Martin, can you continue that thought? Maybe a layman listening might not know the implication of what you’re saying. Can you bring it down to an even more basic level?
Martin:
What we needed was: the water had to be there at a suitable temperature; the heat or light of the sun; possibly then electric discharge from thunderstorms to give enough excitation to produce simple molecules like sugar, and then those organic bases we need to form RNA or DNA and amino acids. All that had to be in place. And then also different types of chemical compounds that repel each other — something like fat and water — so that these fat molecules form a membrane which has a compartment isolated from the outer environment. And in this way we can imagine how cells may have formed, or protocells may have formed, spontaneously.
Cassius:
Okay, now there you’re describing the modern viewpoint. So what is your deduction from that, relating it to this section from Lucretius?
Martin:
Yeah, because he says here that for spontaneous genesis, there need to be the right conditions — “no chilling cold, nor too much heat, nor force of rushing winds.” So all these kinds of conditions have to be in place for spontaneous genesis to happen in his view. And by analogy, similar things have to be in place for a protocell to form from abiotic matter.
Cassius:
Okay, so there you’re basically drawing the parallel that this section from Lucretius does have significant parallels in our modern viewpoint — the requirement of conditions being in a particular set of circumstances in order for life to arise.
Martin:
Yes. But referring only to these very primitive first forms of life, not for what he talks about then — the first setting up of complex life.
Don:
That is such an interesting perspective. I was taking the section in Lucretius literally, and looking at it as more of a metaphor — Martin’s absolutely right that the earth did give rise to all kinds of animals, but it just took a much longer time than what Lucretius is saying. It’s not like animals came out of the wombs that were inside the earth, but that the earth literally did give birth to all the animals and plants and everything — it just took a much longer time than he thinks it did. But it still goes back to those physical, material causes. That’s a really interesting perspective. Thanks for that, Martin.
Cassius:
And so what you guys are saying is that it’s readily possible to take this passage today and reconcile it with modern science if you just modify it by including that it took a much longer period than seems to be implied here.
Martin:
Yeah, I would rather say there’s an analogy.
Don:
I think it’s a valuable way to sort of look at it. We’re talking about poetic language, and there’s no reason we can’t use the analogies and metaphors from modern science and apply them to the ancient texts and say, well, he was at least on to something. He went off the rails on the details, but he was at least on to something — looking at the earth and the material present in the newly formed earth, that did indeed give rise to animal and plant life.
Cassius:
If I understand what you’re saying, Martin — even today you’ve still got a lot of questions to wrestle with about how unliving material turns into living material, and what your definitions of living are, and so forth. And we’re saying that he did not realize the amount of time necessary. But the truth is that probably time is not really the element that’s doing this — there are other aspects as well that need to be explained. His understanding of the time involved is clearly insufficient, but the issue that Martin is reserving on — the spontaneous generation of advanced forms of life — is really to some extent an unresolved question even when you start talking about spontaneous generation of lower forms of life. The issue of going from inanimate to animate is something that even today is still a lively area of research.
Okay Martin, any final thoughts for the day?
Martin:
That was all I had.
Cassius:
Okay, thanks for all of that today. Don, any final thoughts?
Don:
No, I’m just always surprised at how much we can get out of these sections — there are so many wildly different theories about the way he thought things were versus the way we think we know things work. But it always surprises me how much we can squeeze out of these sections. This has been a nice, lively conversation.
Cassius:
Okay, well I appreciate it as always. The one thing I hope I’m not going to be surprised with is that when I start editing this particular episode I find that the audio quality is terrible, because I think it was a very good episode. Hopefully the audio quality will be acceptable today, and I’ll try to do better next week. But at any rate, let’s close there for this week, and we’ll come back in another week or so. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you soon.
Don:
Bye.
Martin:
Bye-bye.