Empedocles' Theory of Cosmic Cycles

According to empedocles, there is a kind of waxing and waning in the power of both love and strife. When love is completely dominant, all the four elements are mixed together in total peace and harmony. But when we are somewhere in between these moments of total domination that things get really interesting. He says that animals emerge in stages - at first you don't get whole animals, but only individual limbs and organs. It's only in a fourth phase that we get animals which are able to reproduce. Empedocles invented the theory of evolution. To darwin: "To carry on by means of inherited features"