"No era's ideas are monolithic..."

From "How Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the World" (Smithsonian, February 2009):

The obvious truths of 1809, the kind that were taught in school, involved what could be called a "vertical" organization of life—one in which we imagine a hierarchy of species on earth, descending from man on down toward animals, and a judge appraising us up above in heaven. Man was stuck in the middle, looking warily up and loftily down. People mostly believed that the kinds of organisms they saw on earth had always been here and always would be, that life had been fixed in place since the beginning of a terrestrial time that was thought to go back a few thousand years at most.