The Great Chain of Being

“The inhabitants of each successive period in the world’s history have beaten their predecessors in the race for life, and are, in so far, higher in the scale of nature; and this may account for the vague yet ill-defined sentiment felt by many paleontologists, that organization on the whole has progressed” (Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 345).

Not so beautiful a sentence as it is interesting. Darwin continues his theme of offspring beating their less fit parents in the struggle for survival. Now, however, it is infused with the Great Chain of Being, the ordered list of creatures based on their advancement. Oddly rather than abandon the idea, Darwin chooses to maintain the Great Chain of Being – created through natural selection, not the mind God – in an appeal to the order-bent minds of his contemporaries.

It took many more years to give up the idea of biological progression in the academic world, but it persists to this day among most people as a common notion. For one reason or another, we are raised to have that “ill-defined sentiment” to place ourselves at the top of the chain, and order the rest of life below us. We feel we are most advanced. Apes may use tools, but they do not build cities. Ants may form cities but they do not create wonders of technology. Obviously we are the most intelligent. Self-deception is easy when we use anthropic criteria.

Evolution should make no appeal to the scale of nature. A creature’s success is determined by its fitness, the number of children it has or by ratio the amount of genetic material it passes on. Surely we are ashamed of any ordering based on evolution’s only criterion for we are quickly humbled by the modest rodent, the fertile fish, or the lowly bacteria.

We, all creatures of this earth, descend from a common ancestor. We adapt to life’s challenges not progress for them.