 Further, this emphasis on mutability, change and “vicissitudes” including at a specifically biological level can sound evolutionary to a post-Darwinian reader, and for Diderot, “to be born, to live, to die is merely to change forms” (RA; DPV XVII: 139), in the “ever-changing” “overall order of nature”: “Everything is in in fluxu et eterno et perpetuo et necessario” (OH; DPV XXIV: 317). He also explicitly uses the Lucretian phrase Rerum novus nascitur ordo. Should these passages be understood as anticipations of evolutionary science? In fact, contrary to a widespread tendency in older scholarship, it is mistaken to consider Diderot as either a predecessor or a speculative exponent of evolutionary doctrines. That he was an earnest disciple of Lucretius, fascinated with monsters and with the transience and mutability of the physical (particularly the living) universe overall, does not make him a “forerunner of Darwin”.