EXCERPT In his dynamicist and historicist vision of nature’s development from geogony to glottogony, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) was a key precursor to Schellingian Naturphilosophie. Published in 1784, his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit presents perhaps the first truly genetic-developmental vision of hominization. Inventing the term ‘Mängelswesen’, and kickstarting the ensuing tradition of philosophical anthropology, Herder placed orthograde spinality utterly centre stage in his account of the genesis of humanity’s peculiarly ‘pliable nature’. Herder, indeed, is the tributary source for many of the motifs encountered across our secret history. Just like Alsberg and Gehlen almost two centuries later, he stresses the ceaseless vestibular vigilance involved in upright standing…