Except that it's the Epicureans that got the closest to modern scientific knowledge in hindsight. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura is the only extant work from anti

Except that it's the Epicureans that got the closest to modern scientific knowledge in hindsight. Lucretius's De Rerum Natura is the only extant work from antiquity to explicitly describe the claim that what we see around us started from senseless primordial beings that through intermediate mutants came to be what we see around us via the process of survival of the fittest in relation to reproduction. It also claimed that trait inheritance occurred as the result of a "doubled seed" from each parent. It theorized that quantized matter must be governed by a degree of uncertainty in outcomes for free will to exist ("the swerve"). That light was also quantized and what we see is the result of these quantized parts moving very quickly. That thunder and lighting might occur at the same time but one moves faster to reach us. That the entire world was the result of primordial quanta randomly interacting. That this was not the only world like it, but was one of an uncountable number of worlds all from this random process. So that's great that a bunch of idiots in antiquity who had no idea what was actually correct thought that Democritus was superior (who they also claimed was just ripping off Mochus of Sidon) and Epicurus the lesser. But their opinions are hardly authoritative given they would have also claimed most of the above wasn't true. The Epicurean understanding of nature was outstanding in retrospect with the exception of his local cosmology.