Recapitulation and the Law of Progress

raglanphdIf you've followed my posts, you can see I hold these gentlemen in very high regard. Two of the greatest thinkers of evolution and the nineteenth century. Haeckel and Spencer sold more more books than Darwin, yet they are not as well known today and are somewhat notorious. Spencer the "social darwinist" and Haeckel the proto-Nazi. These reputations are respectively due to 20th century leftists Richard Hofstadter and Stephen J Gould. The great sin of Spencer and Haeckel was to see evolution as capable of progression and being relevant to human nature and society. 

Spencer's law of progress stated that evolution goes from homogeneity to heterogeneity, from the simple to the complex. Single cellular to multicellular organisms, invertebrates to vertebrates. All life shares a common ancestor, but through different environments and reproductive isolation select different traits which over time result in a diversity of different species. Just because we evolved from a common ancestor with apes doesn't make us apes. 

Haeckel's law of recapitulation stated that the individual's embryonic development (ontogeny) repeats the evolutionary development of their species (phylogeny). This would mean that evolutionary change builds on what came before, and older traits are more primitive since new organisms develop them earlier in life. Such as the gill pouches in the human embryo which are traces of our common ancestry with fish. I do believe evolution can be progressive. That is how we get the diversity of life from a single protoplasm, adapted to different circumstances where they are superior or inferior in. 

Ultimately man comes to be able to learn the laws of nature and comes to understand the universe and attempt to shape it to his own betterment. And yet man is still subject to the laws of nature. Man is but an individual manifestation of the universe's drive towards understanding itself. Some men are more adept at this task and becoming something greater than others. Among man are higher and lower forms, and higher and lower societies. A misunderstanding of Hume's is-ought problem erected a wall between fact and value which really is philosophical in nature and not practical