Template:Are You Sure/February 9

Portrait of physician, philosopher, and free-thinker Lucilio Vanini, who styled himself "Julius Caesar Vanini".

• ... that physician and philosopher Lucilio Vanini was among the first modern thinkers who viewed the universe as an entity governed by natural laws, and the first literate proponent of the thesis that humans evolved from apes, and that on this day in 1619 the Parliament of Toulouse found him guilty of atheism and blasphemy, cut out his tongue, strangled him, and burned his body?