It was von Baer who also showed that the organisation of life forms is not a ‘man-centred hierarchy’, that the human form is just one end-result among many. Robert Owen in his Archetypes and Homologies of the Vertebrate Skeleton (1848) and On the Nature of Limbs (1849) showed that vertebrates have a basically similar structure, which are adapted in different ways but are not ‘aimed’ in a linear way at man.
