In the 1870s, Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist and naturalist, developed the idea of “evolution as progress,” which assumes that all nature is moving toward a final goal: human beings.

Ernst HaeckelErnst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (German: [ˈʔɛɐ̯nst ˈhɛkl̩]; 16 February 1834 – 9 August 1919^[1]) was a German zoologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor, marine biologist, and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including ecology,^[2]phylum,^[3]phylogeny,^[4] and Protista.^[5] Haeckel promoted and popularised Charles Darwin's work^[6] in Germany and developed the influential but no longer widely held recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarises its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.