Page 48 - The Religion of Darwinism

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replaced by the humanist idea of man as the
highest being.
The Great Chain of Being was quite popular
from the Renaissance until the 18th century and
exerted much influence on the materialist
scientists of that era. French scientists Benoit de
Maillet, Pierre de Maupertuis, Comte de Buffon
and Jean Baptiste Lamarck, among others, who
had a strong influence on Charles Darwin, were
men who had appropriated the Greek notion of
the Great Chain of Being. They based their
Pierre de Maupertuis
scientific research on this evolutionist view. The
common tenet of these men was that the various living species were
not created individually but came into existence spontaneously
through a process of evolution dependent on natural conditions a
model similar to Darwin's. For this reason it can be said that modern
evolutionary thought was born in France.
The French evolutionist Comte de Buffon was one of the most
well-known scientists of the 18th century. For more than fifty years he
was the director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Paris. Darwin based
much of his theory on his works. In his 44-volume work Histoire
Naturelle, it is possible to find most of the elements that Darwin was
to use.
The Great Chain of Being was the base of the evolutionist systems
of both de Buffon and Lamarck. The American historian of science,
D.R. Oldroyd, defines their relationship in these words:
In his Histoire Naturelle, Buffon reveals himself as an exponent of
the doctrine of the Great Chain of Being, with man being placed at
the top of the Chain... Lamarck held a version of the ancient
doctrine of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, ...it was not conceived as
a rigid, static structure. By their struggle to meet the requirements
of the environment, and with the help of the principle of the
inheritance of acquired characteristics, organisms could
supposedly work their way up the Chain – from microbe to man,

THE RELIGION OF DARWINISM