ABSTRACT
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Swiss-American palaeoichthyologist, Louis Agassiz (1842, 1859), proposed and argued for a threefold parallelism: the order of living beings, the ontogenetic development of individual organisms, and the history of life as seen in the fossil record. Moreover, claimed Agassiz, the unifying thread is that of progress – from simple to complex, from the uniform to the highly differentiated, from monad to man. Thus in the living world – especially the living world of animals – it is possible to order beings along some kind of scala naturae, from the invertebrates up through the primates, and eventually to humankind. This mirrors the embryological sequences of a simple organism, which also starts with the primitive and (in one species, at least) culminates in full intelligence. And, although Agassiz was never an evolutionist, he thought that God's creative power unfurls down through time until we reach those organisms made in his image.
