How do we date fossils? There are a few ways and in this episode we will look at a couple.

Robert Chambers' masterpiece was titled 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation'. In it he explained how everything evolved. Everything from simple, less complex forms, to more complex forms over time.

Patrick Matthew published 'On Naval Timber and Arboriculture' in 1831. There were a few positive reviews but they were somewhat tepid in their praise. Only a couple reviewers happened to notice something else that Matthew had mentioned in his book. A certain passage that appeared in the book’s appendix. This passage would would later catch the eyes of Charles Darwin.

William Charles Wells, in no uncertain terms, pointed out that mankind is not immune to nature’s ability to modify an organism's features over time.

Jean Baptiste Lamarck's mechanism for evolution was wrong, as history shows, and that fact has haunted his memory ever since. But ideas and theories have ways of being resurrected and, in recent years, there are hints out there that Lamarck wasn’t completely off base when he proposed his theory for the evolution of species.

Erasmus was a country physician. He believed that women should have access to the same education that men did, and that slavery should be abolished. He also believed that life evolved from a single filament that wiggled out of the mud in the distant past.

James Hutton saw the power of natural selection, but he didn’t see how it could eventually, over vast spans of time, mold an animal into something completely different. That would have to wait until Charles Darwin entered the scene over 50 years later.

Diderot devoured the written word. It was food for his mind and he couldn’t get enough of it. He was ravenous when it came to ideas. Especially when those ideas took him into places that others feared to tread.

Benoit de Maillet believed that life, all life, came from the sea. And not only did it come from the sea, but it continued to evolve into different species as it encountered different environments. To present these ideas would be dangerous to him so he wrote it as a work of fiction called Telliamed.

In the first century BC the Roman poet Lucretius wrote On the Nature of Things. A poem with 7400 lines of verse that covered everything from the tiniest particles of matter and how they move, as well as the nature of time and space, consciousness, mortality, and the arrival of life from animals to man.