Diderot and the Metamorphosis of Species

<p>In this study Dr. Gregory examines how Diderot borrowed from Lucretius, Buffon, Maupertuis, and probability theory, and combined ideas from these sources in an innovative fashion to hypothesize that species are mutable and that all life arose randomly from a single prototype. </p> Introduction; Chapter One Chaos, Flux, Time, and Probability; Chapter Two Embryology, Epigenesis, and the Metamorphosis of Species; Chapter Three Spontaneous Generation; Chapter Four The Chain of Beings; Chapter Five The Mutability of Species; Chapter Six The Ascent of Consciousness; Conclusion;