| Their insight was great as well. Most people today are familiar with Aristotle and Plato because the early Christian church embraced Neoplatonism's "perfect design" - but there was a very popular school of philosophy frequently overlooked because it was declared heretical. The Epicureans not only were the first we know of in history to theorize that light was made up of tiny quantized parts moving quickly (the experiment showing this is what Einstein won his Nobel Prize for), they also thought the reason life existed was that out of chaos there were a great many worlds out in the void many which didn't have life at all and we just happened to be on a world with life. They even thought that the first living creatures didn't have any senses at all, and through intermediary "freaks" eventually beings like us came to exist. So there were ancient minds pondering quantized light, the anthropic principle, and evolution. They just didn't have any ways to demonstrate who was actually right, and the group that eventually seized power declared much of what ended up being correct heretical and banned it. They had BOTH insight and ingenuity. What they didn't have was the security or indispensability to protect those qualities from the masses who had neither. |