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Nature 448, 865 (23 August 2007) | doi:10.1038/448865d; Published online 22 August 2007

Drop 'higher' and 'lower' to raise descriptive standards

Michael Mogie1

  1. Centre for Mathematical Biology, Department of Biology and Biochemistry, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK

For most of the past 2,500 years, the dominant view in the West was that life was graded from better to worse, higher to lower, in a Chain of Being. This could be the product of some creative deity or — as in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories proposed by Denis Diderot, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck and Robert Chambers — a consequence of matter somehow organizing itself through a goal-directed, progressive evolutionary process.

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