ABSTRACT
Haeckel formulated his famous biogenetic law that ontogeny is the short and rapid recapitulation of phylogeny. Ontogenetic development in more advanced species reruns and then goes beyond that of less advanced species. The comparative study of cognition, in as long as it has been concerned with evolutionary questions, has been no exception to this tendency. Nonhuman primates do not develop the physical domain of cognition parallel to the logical domain of cognition as human infants do. All basic types of unit that structure logical cognition in the human infant are also found in the nonhuman primate species. The differences just seen in the development of logical cognition give the final blow to any picture of cognitive evolution as a unilinear process. Advancing the development of the logical constructions showed by nonhuman primates would not produce the logical structures of human cognition.
