How Geothe knew about concept of evolution long before Darwin published his On The Origin of Species?

by icandrawyourportrait

In the second part of Faust Proteus gives advice to Homunculus how to be born in this world :

In the ocean deep you must appear!  There, first, in miniature, one snatches, Enjoying the smallest things to swallow, Bigger and bigger, with what one catches, Forming the higher being to follow. ?

CptBuck

Two points:

  1. Charles Darwin didn't invent the concept of evolution in an absolute sense. He had important predecessors like Lamarck, and even his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin.
  2. What Goethe has written here is not an example of Darwinian evolution. It's teleological (smaller creatures get bigger) which is exactly counter to natural selection where evolutionary change is determined solely by a creature's survival advantages, which might involve getting bigger or smaller or staying the same size.

Also I haven't read Faust but is the suggestion here even about inheritance or evolutionary change? Or is it just that one creature, in its own lifetime, gets bigger by devouring, thereby becoming "the higher being to follow"?