The Evolution of Everything: How Small Changes Transform Our World. Matt Ridley

state to explain them. As interpreted by his followers, Epicurus believed, following another Greek philosopher, Democritus, that the world consisted not of lots of special substances including spirits and humours, but simply of two kinds of thing: voids and atoms. Everything, said Epicurus, is made of invisibly small and indestructible atoms, separated by voids; the atoms obey the laws of nature and every phenomenon is the result of natural causes. This was a startlingly prescient conclusion for the fourth century BC.

      Unfortunately Epicurus’s writings did not survive. But three hundred years later, his ideas were revived and explored in a lengthy, eloquent and unfinished poem, De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things), by the Roman poet Titus Lucretius Carus, who probably died in mid-stanza around 49 BC, just as dictatorship was looming in Rome. Around this time, in Gustave Flaubert’s words, ‘when the gods had ceased to be, and Christ had not yet come, there was a unique moment in history, between Cicero and Marcus Aurelius when man stood alone’. Exaggerated maybe, but free thinking was at least more possible then than before or after. Lucretius was more subversive, open-minded and far-seeing than either of those politicians (Cicero admired, but disagreed with, him). His poem rejects all magic, mysticism, superstition, religion and myth. It sticks to an unalloyed empiricism.

      As the Harvard historian Stephen Greenblatt has documented, a bald list of the propositions Lucretius advances in the unfinished 7,400 hexameters of De Rerum Natura could serve as an agenda for modernity. He anticipated modern physics by arguing that everything is made of different combinations of a limited set of invisible particles, moving in a void. He grasped the current idea that the universe has no creator, Providence is a fantasy and there is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. He foreshadowed Darwin in suggesting that nature ceaselessly experiments, and those creatures that can adapt and reproduce will thrive. He was with modern philosophers and historians in suggesting that the universe was not created for or about human beings, that we are not special, and there was no Golden Age of tranquillity and plenty in the distant past, but only a primitive battle for survival. He was like modern atheists in arguing that the soul dies, there is no afterlife, all organised religions are superstitious delusions and invariably cruel, and angels, demons or ghosts do not exist. In his ethics he thought the highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain.

      Thanks largely to Greenblatt’s marvellous book The Swerve, I have only recently come to know Lucretius, and to appreciate the extent to which I am, and always have been without knowing it, a Lucretian/Epicurean. Reading his poem in A.E. Stallings’s beautiful translation in my sixth decade is to be left fuming at my educators. How could they have made me waste all those years at school plodding through the tedious platitudes and pedestrian prose of Jesus Christ or Julius Caesar, when they could have been telling me about Lucretius instead, or as well? Even Virgil was writing partly in reaction to Lucretius, keen to re-establish respect for gods, rulers and top–down ideas in general. Lucretius’s notion of the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances – which the Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana called the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon – has been one of the persistent themes of my own writing. It is the central idea behind not just physics and chemistry, but evolution, ecology and economics too. Had the Christians not suppressed Lucretius, we would surely have discovered Darwinism centuries before we did.

      The Lucretian heresy

      It is by the thinnest of threads that we even know the poem De Rerum Natura. Although it was mentioned and celebrated by contemporaries, and charred fragments of it have been found in the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum (a library belonging probably to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law), it sank into obscurity for much of history. Passing quotations from it in the ninth century AD show that it was very occasionally being read by monks, but by 1417 no copy had been in wide circulation among scholars for more than a millennium. As a text it was effectively extinct. Why?

      It is not hard to answer that question. Lucretius’s special contempt for all forms of superstition, and indeed his atomism, which contradicted the doctrine of transubstantiation, condemned him to obscurity once the Christians took charge. His elevation of the pleasure principle – that the pursuit of pleasure could lead to goodness and that there was nothing nice about pain – was incompatible with the recurring Christian obsession that pleasure is sinful and suffering virtuous.^fn1

      Whereas Plato and Aristotle could be accommodated within Christianity, because of their belief in the immortality of the soul and the evidence for design, the Epicurean heresy was so threatening to the Christian Church that Lucretius had to be suppressed. His atheism is explicit, even Dawkinsian, in its directness. The historian of philosophy Anthony Gottlieb compares a passage from Lucretius with one from Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene. The first talks of ‘the generation of living creatures’ by ‘every sort of combination and motion’; the second of how ‘unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people’. Lucretius was, carped John Dryden, at times ‘so much an atheist, he forgot to be a poet’. He talks about people ‘crushed beneath the weight of superstition’, claims that ‘it is religion breeds wickedness’ and aims to give us ‘the power to fight against the superstitions and the threats of priests’. Little wonder they tried to stamp him out.

      They almost succeeded. St Jerome – keen to illustrate the wages of sin – dismissed Lucretius as a lunatic, driven mad by a love potion, who then committed suicide. No evidence to support these calumnies exists; saints do not show their sources. The charge that all Epicureans were scandalous hedonists was trumped up and spread abroad, and it persists to this day. Copies of the poem were rooted out of libraries and destroyed, as were any other Epicurean and sceptical works. Almost all traces of such materialist and humanist thought had apparently long since vanished from Europe when in 1417 a Florentine scholar and recently unemployed papal secretary named Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini, stumbled upon a copy of the whole poem. Poggio was hunting for rare manuscripts in libraries in central Germany when he came across a copy of De Rerum Natura in a monastic library (probably at Fulda). He sent a hastily-made copy to his wealthy bibliophile friend Niccolò Niccoli, whose transcription was then copied more than fifty times. In 1473 the book was printed and the Lucretian heresy began to infect minds all across Europe.

      Newton’s nudge

      In his passionate attachment to rationalism, materialism, naturalism, humanism and liberty, Lucretius deserves a special place in the history of Western thought, even above the beauty of his poetry. The Renaissance, the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment and the American Revolution were all inspired by people who had to some degree imbibed Lucretius. Botticelli’s Venus effectively depicts the opening scene of Lucretius’s poem. Giordano Bruno went to the stake, with his mouth pinned shut to silence his heresies, for quoting Lucretius on the recombination of atoms and the awe with which we should embrace the idea that human beings are not the purpose of the universe. Galileo’s Lucretian atomism, as well as his Copernican heliocentrism, was used against him at his trial. Indeed, the historian of science Catherine Wilson has argued that the whole of seventeenth-century empiricism, started by Pierre Gassendi in opposition to Descartes, and taken up by the most influential thinkers of the age, including Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, Gottfried Leibniz and Bishop Berkeley, was fuelled to a remarkable extent by the sudden popularity of Lucretius.

      As Lucretian ideas percolated, the physicists were the first to see where they led. Isaac Newton became acquainted with Epicurean atomism as a student at Cambridge, when he read a book by Walter Charleton expounding Gassendi’s interpretation of Lucretius. Later he acquired a Latin edition of De Rerum Natura itself, which survives from his library and shows signs of heavy use. He echoed Lucretian ideas about voids between atoms throughout his books, especially the Opticks.

      Newton was by no means the first modern thinker to banish a skyhook, but he was one of the best. He explained the orbits of the planets and the falling of apples by gravity, not God. In doing so, he did away with the need for perpetual divine interference and supervision by an overworked creator. Gravity kept the earth orbiting the sun without