In this chapter I take a detailed look at the evolutionary storytelling of Ernst Haeckel. He founded phylogenetics as the science dedicated to tracing the evolution of lineages. Although Haeckel’s phylogenetic scenarios were nourished from a broad buffet of evidence, the biogenetic law was his favorite shortcut to create lineages of hypothetical ancestors, most famously the tiny cup-shaped Gastraea. A recent consensus has emerged that stigmatizes Haeckel’s phylogenies as unDarwinian constructs that are conceptually stained by teleological thinking and the linearity of the scala naturae. Instead, I argue that his trees are fully Darwinian, and that the linearity present in his trees and thinking is the linearity of evolving lineages that track the arrow of time. Lineage thinking was novel when Haeckel started writing, and his was marred by imperfections. It was up to the following generations of evolutionists to resolve the conceptual tension between the linear and branching aspects of evolution, a struggle that is still ongoing in today’s literature.

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.