Lucretius was a self-declared enemy of Scripture. He said that if the origin of things could be explained without the need for gods, by natural means, people would cease to have fear of right and wrong, and would develop freely, doing and behaving as they desired. Bent on doing just that, Lucretius went into detail on the formation of life from non-life in a primordial "soup" and spent a good deal of time explaining the long evolutionary ascent of life from simple to complex. He went into great detail discussing the influence of environmental factors like food supply on the evolutionary development of new adaptations.
Finally, according to Lucretius, life evolved as far as the early ancestors of man, primitive creatures having a "framework of bigger and solider bones fastened through their flesh to stout sinews.
His analysis (some of which was deductive, some inductive) anticipated modern scientific theories by about 1800 years. His statement of what became the First and Second laws of Thermodynamics, his anticipation of the Cosmological Principle, along with some of the Laws of Motion (if I remember correctly), are absolutely astounding. It just goes to show that people living 2000 years ago were just as observant and intelligible as people are today (if not more so). On top of the science that is contained in the work, the fact that it was originally composed in poetic form makes it even more praiseworthy. Furthermore, the prose translation is outstanding. I've never read a translation of an ancient philosophical work that was as easy to read as this one was.
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