Evolutionary ideas were in circulation before Charles Darwin began his work and were widely disseminated, arousing much controversy. In addition to the writings of Erasmus Darwin (Charles’ grandfather), French ideas gained some currency in the English-speaking world, especially the views of J. B. Lamarck. These ideas were taken up by radical thinkers who rejected divine creation, to the horror of conservatives. Early discoveries of fossils played a significant role in arousing public interest in the history of life and were often seen as evidence that life had ascended a scale of development (the chain of being) toward humanity. The first-known dinosaurs were fitted into the chain as gigantic lizards, not as evidence of creatures totally unlike anything now alive. This model was adapted to middle-class values in Robert Chambers’ Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844, again arousing controversy but gradually gaining some credibility beyond the scientific community.

Race’ presents Goldsmith as a writer who played a role in the consolidation of racial ideology in the eighteenth century. Contrary to the views of some who would hold Goldsmith as an anti-imperialist writer, Goldsmith is presented here as an author whose natural historical writings in particular popularize ostensibly scientific hierarchies of race which themselves informed and underpinned ideologies of empire and subjugation.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.

The last step in the ascent of the chain of being was from the apes (considered as the highest animals) to humans. In the eighteenth century the linear model of the chain was applied to this transition by depicting the non-European races as intermediate stages between the apes and the highest human type. Nineteenth-century anthropologists used various characters, especially skull size and shape, to give an appearance of scientific credibility to the supposed racial hierarchy. Early theories of evolution often treated the 'lower' races as relics of earlier stages in the origin of humanity. When evolution was represented as a branching tree, the concept of parallelism was invoked to imply that some branches of humanity had not advanced as rapidly up the scale as others. Europeans' sense of their own racial superiority was thus preserved in the post-Darwinian era by converting the chain of being into an abstract scale of mental development ascended by several forms but at different rates.

The chain of being depicted creation as a linear hierachy of living forms from the simplest up to the human. In the eighteenth century it was 'temporalized' to give a model for the history of life on earth implying that humanity was the last and highest product of the creative process. This image of development was boosted by a comparison with the growth of the embryo to maturity. Early theories of evolution continued to present the process as an ascent towards humanity as its goal. Parallels were drawn with the goal-directed process of embryological development, implying that the embryo recapitulates the history of life on earth. Even when naturalists realized that evolution was best represented as a branching tree rather than a ladder, the tree was given a central trunk pointing toward humanity, all other developments being mere side-branches. The claim that humanity is the goal of creation survived in various non-Darwinian theories of evolution in the late nineteenth century.

This introduction outlines a new interpretation of the history of the idea of progress, focusing on the transition from a goal-directed model to an open-ended view in which there can be multiple forms of improvement. Developments in thinking about the history of life on earth are used as a guide to wider changes in the perception of how progress can operate. Early ideas based on the chain of being saw humanity as the goal of biological evolution, just as the first theories of social progress saw it as the ascent of a linear hierarchy of steps towards a future paradise or utopia. Darwinism transformed evolutionism by introducing the image of a branching 'tree of life' with no single goal of progress. Parallels to this transformation can be seen in twentieth-century approaches to human history and predictions of multiple possible futures based on the unpredictability of technological innovations. Progress has become less clear-cut and more open to criticism by those who reject the utilitarian basis of technological advance.