A Brief History of Life

When the Athenian philospoher Plato died in 347 BC his student, Aristotle, left Athens and moved to the Aegean island of Assos. With the help of other philosophers he established... Read more »

A political novel called Utopia was published in 1516 by Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) followed a hundred years later by Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis, outlining a new experimental method.   Sir... Read more »

During this period of just over a hundred years there was more creativity and realism than ever before and it appeared in the publications of three innovators. These recorded the... Read more »

While Galileo was in trouble with the religious courts in Rome, the same English lawyer who published New Atlantis in 1624, Francis Bacon, was working out how to practice what... Read more »

One dark morning in October 1666 several boats of fishermen unloaded the body of a shark they had taken offshore from Livorno just south of Pisa, in Tuscany. So big... Read more »

The Rev John Ray (1627-1705) was one of the new thinkers influenced directly by Bacon, and he used his fellowship at Cambridge to make a big impact on how his... Read more »

Robert Hooke (1635-1703), for one, was skeptical about the famous physical scientist Robert Boyle wanting to absorb all the new scientific discoveries, especially the history of life, into the philosophy... Read more »

Because it had a university and was close to London, Oxfordshire was a place where field studies of living and fossil species were opening up the vast scale of life’s... Read more »

Slaughter’s Coffee House in London’s Saint Martin’s Lane was the haunt of a lot of excited young men. During the Enlightenment of eighteenth century England, these people were hoping for... Read more »

Throughout the 1750s and 1760s men of science became especially interested in the exotic treasures being brought back from tropical shores by a brave new generation of explorers. While they... Read more »