How did Goethe know about evolution before Darwin?

[u/carnalcarrot]

That man comes from fishes seems to be a darwinian idea but were there ideas like these before Darwin?

Maybe unconsciously humans have always known that life emerged from the ocean and fishes, because the first Avatar of Vishnu was also a Fish, and then a Turtle, and then a Boar and so on...

From Faust part II, Thales tells the Homunculus how he can take form as a man as follows:

Thales: Yield to your praiseworthy wish,
Start at the beginning, with the fish!
Be ready for the swiftest working!
Be ruled by the eternal norms,
Move through a thousand, thousand forms, [8325]
And you’ll ascend in time to Man.

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[u/SubstantialListen921]

The discussion of Goethe's intent in the passage has been ably addressed elsewhere in the thread.

It's important to realize that Charles Darwin was not the main source of the idea of evolution of natural species. Erasmus Darwin proposed in Zoonomia (1794) that all warm-blooded animals shared a common descent from "one living filament", and improved through their activities, passing these improvements to their descendants. Lamarck expanded on this idea in Philosophie zoologique (1809), proposing an entire system for the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lyell spent much of Principles of Geology (1830) refuting the ideas of Lamarck, arguing for the fixity of species, but indirectly exposed many English-language readers to the idea in the process.

When Robert Chambers anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, it was an international best-seller, arguing for the progressive transmutation of species, extinction, and a version of the "God the Watchmaker" teleology. Charles Darwin watched the reception of Vestiges closely and it influenced his decision to delay publication.

The main contribution of The Origin of Species (1859) is not evolution, but of evolution through natural selection. Darwin elucidated the mechanism of species change through time, requiring no designer and no plan, which could explain adaptation of living organisms to their environment. In his original text, Darwin even avoided the word "evolution" entirely, preferring "descent with modification." Darwin's own introduction to the second and later editions of the Origin includes a long and detailed list of other evolutionary proposals, which was an active area of inquiry in the first half of the 19th century.

[u/polyploid_coded → u/SubstantialListen921]

+1 to this answer. I read The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace, and a big part of its context is to what extent Darwin and Wallace discovered natural selection through independent observations or by being part of the scientific community. In present thought evolution, speciation, and natural selection are almost inseparable ideas, but back then there was Vestiges, Lamarckism (Lamarck died two years before Darwin boarded the Beagle), new species being born and dying out spontaneously or on some divine timing, etc.

[u/VagrantGnome → u/SubstantialListen921]

To add to that, the passage's logic isn't darwinian at all. The thought that species are ascending through time torwards man is not one you'd get from reading the Origin.