EVOLUTION AND ENTROPY 307 



in this modern and history-minded period, it is a well known 

 fact that the first evolutionist was not Darwin," In the 

 writings of Buffon, Kant, and Laplace there are theories of the 

 evolution of the solar system. Buffon, in his monumental work, 

 Epochs of Nature (1778) ^^ theorized that the solar system 

 originated from a collision between a comet and the sun, and 

 he proposed a whole chronology concerning the cooling of the 

 earth to its present temperature. Kant held to a nebular 

 hypothesis in which an original cosmic dust, subjected to the 

 forces of attraction and repulsion, gave rise to the solar system 

 as we now know it.^- In 1796, Laplace brought the weight of 

 his authority to the nebular theory and reduced the distribution 

 of momentum among the apparently evolving planets to New- 

 tonian laws. In the spirit of Shapley's remarks, already quoted, 

 the notion of biological evolution when it finally caught on 

 through Darwin's research and writing, could already be set 

 within a larger evolutionary framework. In our own century, 

 the study of the galaxy and the discovery, through more power- 

 ful telescopes, that there are other galaxies besides our own — 

 in fact, billions of them with the most distant believed to be 

 six billion light years away — led to the theory that there are 

 countless " island universes " and extended the problem of 

 cosmology from a study of the solar system to a concern with 

 the laws governing the " arrangement, past, present, and future 

 of the galaxies in the universe." " 



As we look at the cold facts, there is a whole array of evidence 

 that our universe was not always as it now is. There is, for 

 instance, radioactivity, the elongation of the moon, the apparent 

 succession of living forms as shown by the geological record, 

 slight but none the less real irregularities in planetary move- 



" Cf. B. Glass, et al, eds., Forerunners of Darwin 17^5-1859 (Baltimore, 1959) . 



^^ Des epoques de la nature, ed. L. Picard (Paris, 1894), first published in 1778. 



^^ Cf. W. Hastie, Kant's Cosmogony as in his Essay on the Retardation of the 

 Rotation of the Earth and his Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (Glasgow, 

 1900) . 



^^ H. Bondi, "Astronomy and Cosmology," in What is Science? ed. J. Newman 

 (New York, 1955) p. 66. 



