Cosmos - Carl Sagan  ## Metadata - Author: **Carl Sagan** - Full Title: Cosmos - Category: #books ## Highlights - From this Anaximander concluded that human beings arose from other animals with more self-reliant newborns: He proposed the spontaneous origin of life in mud, the first animals being fish covered with spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and moved to dry land, where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of one form into another. (Page 185) - Tags: #biology - Empedocles, who flourished around 450 B.C. Some accounts claim he identified himself as a god. But perhaps it was only that he was so clever that others thought him a god. He believed that light travels very fast, but not infinitely fast. He taught that there was once a much greater variety of living things on the Earth, but that many races of beings must have been unable to beget and continue their kind. ..., Empedocles, like Anaximander Democritus, clearly anticipated some aspects of Darwin's great idea of evolution by natural selection. (Page 187)