Great Chain of Being vs Darwin

In the pre-1859 thinking that lay behind the concept of The Great Chain of Being , all species of Life were born on the same day (all had a common birthday) but all were subject to different individual creations (so had different 'parents' , in a metaphorical sense).

 In 1859, Darwin neatly reversed this : now all species of Life had one common parent (some slimy little bacteria) but all the species had wildly different birthdays, as Life branched out over time from that early single bacteria's beginnings.

Cue the scientific 'justification' for Aktion T4 and the Holocaust.

In the era of the Great Chain, all the different species of Life were put in some human-sensible order, so that species were put on the bottom if small and immobile and devoid of senses and of thought.

On this accounting, unsurprisingly, Man was clearly on top.

But no species was judged to be truly worthless or even hopelessly harmful, Life unworthy of Life.

God or the gods had to have had a good reason for creating them, unknowable to Man.

Each species was thought of as a single perfect type with variants thrown up to suit local circumstance and defective beings thrown up from time to time as a mere freaks of random-acting Nature.

So all bears (or all brown bears) could disappear from Ireland without the fear this meant the species of bear or the subspecies of brown bears had disappeared for all time from the rest of the earth.

Before 1859, the rich could say quite smugly - and did say quite smugly - "the poor will always be with us" and mean it totally sincerely.

The poor (and icky creepie-crawlies) were not judged to be Progress's evolutionary mistakes along the road between imperfect bacilli and perfect 20th century middle class Englishman.

They were just some weird whim of a truly inscrutable God.

But after 1859, the best educated began to say "the unworthy of life poor will only be with us until we can fire up the eugenic gas chamber" - and mean it equally sincerely.

The Great Chain of Being definitely had its permanent Tops and Bottoms.

Now Darwin's Evolution finally gave the Bottoms a chance to climb the evolutionary ladder - cue the Communist proletarian.

But it also gave the Bottoms a more than equal chance to fall off the evolutionary ladder (at the end of a rope) - with their ankles being tugged gently by the likes of the banally evil George Bernard Shaw ....