Advocates of this or that political philosophy will sometimes point to a selected example of animal behavior as a "natural" model that is supposed to tell us something about humans—even if their rivals come up with a different model exemplifying the opposite. I've never understood why people take much notice of things like this. Whether some kinds of ape are social and "democratic," while others are hierarchical and "authoritarian" has to do with apes, and that's all. It's not relevant to the organizing of human societies. In a similar kind of way, the prevailing cosmological models adopted by societies throughout history—the kind of universe they believe they live in, and how it originated—tend to mirror the political, social, and religious fashion of the times.
Universes in which gods judged the affairs of humans were purpose-built and had beginnings. Hence, the Greek Olympians with their creation epics and thunderbolts, and mankind cast in a tragedy role, heroic only in powers to endure whatever fate inflicted. These also tend to be times of stagnation or decline, when the cosmos too is seen as running downhill from a state of initial perfection toward ruin that humans are powerless to avert. Redemption is earned by appeasing the supernatural in such forms as the God of Genesis and of the Christendom that held sway over Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the stirring of the Renaissance.
But in times of growth and confidence in human ability to build better tomorrows, the universe too evolves of itself, by its own internal powers of self-organization and improvement. Thoughts turn away from afterlives and retribution, and to things of the here and now, and the material. The gods, if they exist at all, are at best remote, preoccupied with their own concerns, and the cosmos is conceived as having existed indefinitely, affording time for all the variety and complexity of form to have come about through the operation of unguided natural forces. Thus, with Rome ruling over the known world, Lucretius expounded the atomism of Epicurus, in which accidental configurations of matter generated all of sensible physical reality and the diversity of living things. A millennium later, effectively the same philosophy reappeared in modern guise as the infinite machine set up by Newton and Laplace to turn the epochal wheels for Lyell and Darwin. True, Newton maintained a religious faith that he tried to reconcile with the emerging scientific outlook; but the cosmos that he discovered had no real need of a creator, and God was reduced to a kind of caretaker on the payroll, intervening occasionally to tweak perturbed orbits and keep the Grand Plan on track as it unfolded.
Even that token to tradition faded, and by the end of the nineteeth century, with Victorian exultation of unlimited Progress at its zenith, the reductionist goal of understanding all phenomena from the origin of life to the motions of planets in terms of the mechanical operations of natural processes seemed about complete. This was when Lord Kelvin declared that the mission of science was as good as accomplished, and the only work remaining was to determine the basic constants to a few more decimal places of accuracy.
That world and its vision self-destructed in the trenches of 1914–18. From the aftermath emerged a world of political disillusionment, roller-coaster economics, and shattered faith in human nature. Mankind and the universe, it seemed, were in need of some external help again.