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  • 2 - From the Chain of Being to the Ladder of Creation

  • from Part I - The Ladder of Progress and the End of History
  • Peter J. Bowler, Queen's University Belfast
  • Book:
    Progress Unchained
    Published online:
    11 February 2021
    Print publication:
    04 March 2021, pp 27-68
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  • Summary

    The chain of being depicted creation as a linear hierachy of living forms from the simplest up to the human. In the eighteenth century it was 'temporalized' to give a model for the history of life on earth implying that humanity was the last and highest product of the creative process. This image of development was boosted by a comparison with the growth of the embryo to maturity. Early theories of evolution continued to present the process as an ascent towards humanity as its goal. Parallels were drawn with the goal-directed process of embryological development, implying that the embryo recapitulates the history of life on earth. Even when naturalists realized that evolution was best represented as a branching tree rather than a ladder, the tree was given a central trunk pointing toward humanity, all other developments being mere side-branches. The claim that humanity is the goal of creation survived in various non-Darwinian theories of evolution in the late nineteenth century.