Lucilio Vanini

Lucilio Vanini, who styled himself Giulio Cesare Vanini in his own works, was an Italian philosopher, physician and free-thinker regarded as one of the first significant representatives of intellectual libertinism. He was among the first modern thinkers to treat the universe as governed throughout by natural laws rather than divine caprice, a position historians call nomological determinism, and he argued in print that humans and other apes share common ancestors, making him an early literate proponent of what would become the idea of biological evolution. His views brought him into open conflict with religious authority, and he was arrested in Toulouse in November 1618 and executed there in February 1619, his tongue cut out and his body burned after strangulation at the stake.