Lady Margaret Lecture: Socrates vs Darwin. Transcript. Darwin's theory dealt the coup de grâce to the teleological way of thinking about nature which had dominated the minds of both the learned and the lay for more than two millennia, before it was gradually undermined by the rise of modern science. But when did the teleological era begin? David Sedley traces the career of the teleological way of thinking from its beginnings throughout the Hellenistic period: Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Socrates, Plato, the Atomists, Aristotle, and the Stoics, with a short epilogue on Galen.