Aristotle

He said that various phenomena occur in nature is not to make known in advance the intended target: the rain is not to grow grain, and not to destroy him during threshing in the open air ; of body parts, not in order were formed to carry out certain goals in life: one of them at its inception have been appropriate, other - inappropriate, and only those survived who had a first property, while others have disappeared or are continuing to disappear. In addition, we find in Aristotle's understanding of certain geological phenomena. He talks about the dry lakes, the annual growth of deposits in the Nile Delta and talks about lifting and earth changes that occur so slowly that their results can not been noted by man throughout his life. But stagirsky naturalist was not equally happy in all his wit's end, and as for fossils, he expressed less plausible view than his predecessors. Incidentally, he remarked that the fossilized fish, found near Hercules in Asia Minor could be formed from the eggs left behind living in the lake fish. But one accidentally mistaken view can not darken the glory of a great man. He is not responsible for the fact that such ideas were eagerly caught up in the later period, and ranged all possible and impossible ways. Representations of Aristotle on the origin of the fossils have the most influence on medieval beliefs and formed the basis of hard exterminable errors: they held out for a thousand years, and found adherents even among the geologists of our time. After the great migration of peoples scientific activity revived, but she was long confined to the study of what is left as a legacy from the ancient world: in the foreground was the Bible and the writings of Aristotle. From these two sources have drawn all the geological and paleontological data, free inquiry there was no place: from the Bible was taken ready-made idea of ??the creation of the world in seven days of Noah's flood; Aristotle also taught that fossils are not remnants of extinct animals: they were formed in the rock by some unexplained process, it is - "a freak of nature."