Evolution: The Atheist’s Religion-Part 2-The Great Chain of Being

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currently listening to: Dan Deacon-Bromst

The Great Chain of Being

Picking up from where I left off, from the fall of Rome till the renaissance, the Catholic church had taken hold and generally dictated philosophy/cosmology.  Origen, Augustine, and Aquinas all managed to push a mishmash of Creationist principles and pantheistic ideas (like that of Plato, Aristotle, “The Great Chain of Being/Scale of Being”, but also like some theistic evolution you see today) to the forefront while atheistic/naturalistic ideas were pushed underground.

With the “Scale of Being” concepts dominating the time, many evolutionary precursors sprung forth from it.  Remember, the original idea behind the scale of being philosophy was that it worked “top-down”, sort of a devolution (i.e. From God, or a god, came about successive lower forms of life–not necessarily directly from each other, but rather conceptually so everything could be ordered in a way to be better understood).  It was quasi-theological at best, and certainly not Biblical.  Though in fact all that separated the scale of being from evolution was a conception of time in vast quantities added to mutability of form.  In other words, a universe not made but being made continuously.

One of the first to look at the great chain in a more modern evolutionary approach was Comte de Buffon (1707-1788).  His work, Histoire Naturelle, while leaning heavily on Scala Naturae (great chain of being), managed to put forth many of the ideas used in later works by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and ultimately Darwin himself.  His writings included precursors to comparative anatomy, long time scales, and biogeography.  He did, however, still believe in the immutability of species.  Darwin himself gave Buffon some credit in early pre-”Origin” writings and Ernst Mayr said of Buffon ” He was not an evolutionist, yet he was the father of evolutionism.”

Alongside Buffon, rose other ideas based on the scale of being.  “Progressionism” (and sometimes catastrophism), developed by Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), probably helped reverse the top-down scale of being approach more than anything else.  Cuvier believed that catastrophes (the last being the Noahic flood) brought about new assemblages of organisms with each group being progressively more complex than the preceding (bottom-up development).

Another important idea developed from the great chain of being was ontogenetic recapitulation.  This theory (now completely discredited) became a cornerstone for “proof” of evolution by Darwin himself. What it says is that embryonic development of humans is in itself a representation of going from the bottom of the chain to the top. Friedrich Kielmayer, amongst other German “nature philosophers”, originated this idea going back to the late 1700s.  More on this theory later.

So, now we have connected the ancient greek philosophical idea of the Great Chain of Being as a profoundly influential concept in the development of evolutionary theory.  Next up: A look at those most influential to Darwin