History
In the 19th century, some scientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Ray Lankester believed that all Nature had an innate striving to become more complex with evolution. This belief may reflect then-current ideas of Hegel and Herbert Spencer that all creation was gradually evolving to a higher, more perfect state.
According to this view, the evolution of parasites from an independent organism to another parasite was seen as "devolution" or "degeneration", and contrary to Nature. This view has sometimes been used metaphorically by social theorists and propagandists to decry a class of people as "degenerate parasites". Today, "devolution" is regarded as nonsense; rather, lineages will become simpler or more complicated according to whatever forms have a selective advantage.
Read more about this topic: Evolution Of Biological Complexity
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
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—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)