Evolution: The Remarkable History of a Scientific Theory

Book by Edward J Larson

CHAPTER 1

Bursting the Limits of Time

Georges Cuvier had a large head-a famously large head-and an ego more than sufficient to swell even it. From his position atop the French scientific establishment during the first third of the nineteenth century, he accumulated high academic posts and official honors like some favored children collect toys: never enough and all kept in play. For his contributions to laying the foundations of modern biology, Cuvier willingly suffered comparisons to Aristotle, the acknowledged founder of the science. As a naturalist, Cuvier fancied himself "the French Newton"-bringing order to the life sciences much as Isaac Newton brought order to the physical sciences. Cuvier's rigorous empirical methods opened windows into the earth's biological history that would lead others to a vision of organic evolution he steadfastly refused to see. More than any other naturalist, he so greatly influenced the style and substance of nineteenth-century biology that the history of the modern scientific theory of evolution rightly begins with him-its staunchest foe.

Born in 1769 into an educated, bourgeois family in the Protestant, French-speaking portion of the independent French-German duchy of Württemberg, Cuvier was trained at a regional academy to serve in the duke's government. Pushed by his mother to excel academically, Cuvier's formal education included a solid introduction to natural history, a traditional subject encompassing such modern fields as biology, geology, oceanography, mineralogy, and paleontology. This subject became his passion. In 1788, with no government position open to him at home, Cuvier accepted employment as a private tutor for a French noble family in Normandy. There, as a sideline, he immersed himself in the study of marine invertebrates. From the relative safety of rural Normandy, Cuvier witnessed the French Revolution that began, from his perspective, with high hopes in 1789 but turned terribly ugly during the early 1790s. Becoming a citizen of France in 1793, when the French government annexed his homeland, Cuvier accepted a post in the revolutionary administration of Normandy even as he turned viscerally against the central regime's Terror and focused his own attentions on zoological fieldwork. In 1795, when a moderate republican government took power in Paris and promised to rebuild the central scientific establishment decapitated during the Terror, Cuvier moved to the capital in search of a career in science. There were plenty of openings for a naturalist of his obvious brilliance and driving ambition. Cuvier gained an assistantship at the renowned Museum of Natural History, and never looked back. His subsequent rise was meteoric. The study of natural history would never be the same.

Cuvier concentrated his scientific research on the burgeoning field of comparative anatomy; he was convinced that the internal structure of an animal revealed its function and therefore its true nature. In biology as in all else, form followed function for Cuvier. His research profited greatly from his position at the world's premier natural-history museum-an institution that rapidly became ever more comprehensive in its zoological holdings as Napoleon's armies plundered the collections of Europe and sent home live, preserved, and fossilized specimens from as far afield as Russia and Egypt. Ultimately, Cuvier proposed that there are four (but only four) basic anatomical types (he called them "embranchements") of animals: vertebrates (with backbones), molluscs (with shells), articulates (such as insects), and radiates (such as starfish). "Lesser divisions," he wrote, "are only modifications superficially founded on development or on the addition of certain parts, but which in no way change the essence of the plan."1 This view, built solidly on anatomical analysis and still reflected (with modifications) in modern taxonomy, shattered the hierarchical concept dating from Aristotle of a single great chain of beings rising in fine gradations from the simplest living form to humans at the top. The idea within biology of giving an anthropomorphic order to all living things gave way to studying them on their own terms.

Cuvier was the first naturalist to have at his disposal a suitably complete collection of the world's mammals-past and present-to make definitive distinctions among them. He made the most of this advantage, hoarding it to himself, his collaborators, and his protegés. In 1796, for example, he announced that, based on his anatomical comparisons of actual specimens, the elephants of India and Africa constituted two distinct species, and that both of them differed from the elephant-like mammoth found only in fossil remains. The positive identification of other living and extinct mammals followed one after another in rapid succession. To account for so many extinct species, as early as 1796 Cuvier announced "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some kind of catastrophe."2

Before Cuvier, European naturalists typically held that no species-all of them perfect in their original creation-ever died out. Fossils had no fundamental significance: Such things were simply sports of nature or remnants of some still-living species. Overturning this view, Cuvier ultimately concluded that all fossilized animals differed in kind from modern ones and that no modern species existed in truly fossil form. He boldly claimed the power "to burst the limits of time, and, by some observations [of fossils], to recover the history of the world, and the succession of events that preceded the birth of the human species."3

Suddenly, life had a history different from the present, and fossil fragments revealed it. "As a new species of antiquarian," Cuvier explained, "I have had . . . to reconstruct the ancient beings to which these fragments belonged; to reproduce them in their proportions and characters; and finally to compare them to those that live today."4 The modern science of paleontology was born in Cuvier's laboratory. Because of his conviction that the form of any animal precisely served its functional needs, Cuvier confidently assumed that trained researchers could, in principle, reconstruct its entire structure from any one of its functional parts. Paleontologists could do for extinct animals what comparative anatomists did for living ones-definitively identify them. Doing so for all of the earth's past and present species became Cuvier's goal for science-and he himself would launch the effort, doing his own best work with fishes and four-footed mammals.

A compulsive worker, stern and impatient, Cuvier never doubted his own ability as a science researcher, educator, and administrator. He mastered the treacherous shoals of French academic politics just as ably as he mastered comparative anatomy. Even as he climbed the professional ladder within the Museum of Natural History, Cuvier gained leadership posts at the National Institute and the University of France-giving him unparalleled influence over patronage within the country's highly centralized science establishment. Napoleon named Cuvier to the Council of State in 1813, and he deftly kept his seat (and steadily expanded his portfolio) under three succeeding monarchs. Remarkably, even though every ruler he served was forcibly driven from office at least once, Cuvier held each of his official posts for life and died peacefully in his bed in 1832.

Napoleon ennobled him as a chevalier; Louis XVIII promoted him to the rank of baron; under Charles X, he became a grand officer of the Legion of Honor; Louis-Philippe made him a peer of France. "Cuvier was short and during the Revolution was thin," one biographer wryly noted. "He became stouter during the Empire; and he grew enormously fat after the Restoration."5 Still there was that massive head, crowned with a thick mane of hair. According to one observer, Cuvier's head "gave to his entire person an undeniable cachet of majesty and to his face an expression of profound meditation."6 Here was the lion of nineteenth-century French science and founder of modern comparative anatomy and paleontology. Yet his reasoned scientific arguments for the theory of special creation held back the tide of evolutionary thought, which had been rising since the Enlightenment, for a generation.

On the matter of organic evolution (or "the transmutation of species," as the concept was then called), it was not simply that Cuvier died before the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species and therefore never seriously considered the idea. He studied it carefully (albeit not in the light of Darwin's later arguments for it) and found it wanting. Although Cuvier's conclusions on this score reflected his religious and social beliefs, they were founded on his scientific understanding of nature. These added factors-religious and social-

reveal telling aspects of pre-Darwinian Western thought about biological origins. They will be examined first.Living in a particularly volatile era of French religious history characterized by alternating phases of Enlightenment scepticism, Revolutionary atheism, and Restoration Catholicism, Cuvier stood apart from most others within the cultural elite of France by remaining a churchgoing Protestant during his entire life. Indeed, he visibly aligned himself with his religious minority by overseeing government programs for Protestant education and serving as vice president of the Protestant Bible Society of Paris. He married a socially prominent Roman Catholic widow of the Terror, Anne Marie Coquet du Trazail, but they raised their children as Protestants. When his daughter Clémentine adopted an evangelical form of Protestantism, however, she grew to doubt her father's salvation and prayed for his conversion. That was not about to happen, at least on her terms. By definition, evangelicals publicly proclaim their religious beliefs and seek to convert others. But for Georges Cuvier religion was a strictly private...