He disliked exploration, worked day and night and inadvertently provided the impetus for Darwin's theory of evolution. The Frenchman Georges Cuvier was one of the greatest scientists of the first half of the nineteenth century. Kennislink did a 'fictional interview' with the stubborn, hard-working man from Paris.
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) was the first biologist to deduce from fossils that there must have been species that no longer exist. Through his study of strata he developed the theory of catastrophism. In it he stated that the world is stable, but occasionally changes drastically due to catastrophes such as a meteorite impact, with the result that some species become extinct.
He studied, dissected and drew almost every species known in the animal kingdom during his lifetime. Based on his own work, he devised a new arrangement of animals in four sub-realms. He himself did not believe in evolution at all. Yet it was his work, with fabulously accurate drawings and descriptions of fossils, that helped Darwin enormously.
How did you get into science Baron Cuvier? Did you grow up in a family of scientists?
“No no, on the contrary. I grew up in Montbéliard in eastern France. My father was in the military and we never talked about science at home, but at a young age I was given the book Histoire Naturelle of Count de Buffon and I was inspired by the beautiful drawings. When I got a little older and studied in Stuttgard, the books of Carolus Linnaeus followed, after which my interest in the classification of animals arose. After my studies I moved to Caen in Normandy and I was able to work as a teacher with an aristocratic family. Fortunately, I had enough free time in which I described all kinds of animals. That's where I got the idea to write a book about natural history myself."
That just took a while. What came up?
“When I was 20 years old, the Bastille was stormed by the people of Paris. The revolution that followed caused a small interruption in my scientific work. There was food scarcity and we had other things on our minds than science. In 1795 I went to Paris myself after receiving an invitation from the naturalist Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hillaire. He made sure that I could get a job as a natural history teacher at one of the new Ecoles Centrales that arose during the revolution. In addition, I became an assistant to the professor of animal anatomy at the Natural History Museum of Paris and I became a member of the Académie des Sciences in the field of anatomy and zoology.”
That's when your research started again. What was it like to work at the Natural History Museum?
“That was phenomenal. I was able to enjoy myself completely and created my own cabinet of the animal kingdom in which I wanted to pay particular attention to comparative anatomy. All animals were sorted by class and clearly showed the relationship between form and function. Within a few years I had collected 16,665 copies and the cabinet attracted visitors from all over the world. Even Charles Lyell came to Paris from London to see the collection!”
At that time, your research on fossils also began. What were your most extraordinary discoveries?
“In 1800, I demonstrated that the teeth of fossil mammoths from Siberia, while very similar to the teeth of African and Asian elephants, were different. They had to be of a species that no longer existed and thus became extinct. No one had ever had that thought, or at least hadn't expressed it. An enormous skull was found in a quarry in Maastricht in 1808, which must have belonged to an enormous marine lizard, similar to a monitor lizard. This species was also extinct. Another special discovery was that of a small reptile from a lithographic limestone slab from Bavaria. The species had never been seen. It occurred to me that he must belong to a group of flying reptiles. I named that group Pterodactyl. I was the first who, after years of looking at the anatomy of animals in relation to their function, was able to make a reconstruction of animals that were extinct.”
In 1812 you bundled all your research into the book Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles de Quadrupèdes. Can you tell us something about that?
“In that work there are dozens of images of complete skeletons of extinct sloths, the bones of a mummified ibis from ancient Egypt, pages full of mammoth molars and series of thigh bones of long-extinct elephant-like animals. The engravings are for the most part made with my own drawings. Also in that work I first proposed the division of the animal kingdom into four sub-kingdoms; the vertebrata (vertebrates, ed._), the articulata Hypothesis, mollusca (molluscs, ed. ) and radiation. There I went in my 1817 book, La Règne Animal Distribué d'après son Organisation, further into. My goal was to capture and classify all the animal species I knew.”
With that arrangement you went against the prevailing ideas of a Scala Naturæ, a classification of nature devised by Aristotle. How did people react to that?
“Now you see, the Scala Naturæ presupposes an ordering of nature and the universe in a clear hierarchical system of ascending perfection. Because of my extensive research on fossils, I, and many others with me, simply couldn't believe in that anymore. Nature showed us that things were different!”
In 1825 you described another such innovative theory, that of catastrophism. How did you come up with that idea?
“Together with my colleague Alexandre Brongniart, I did research on strata near Paris. We found that different layers could be distinguished from each other by the type of fossils contained in the layer. We figured the layers were piled up because one layer had to be older than the other. Sometimes it was clear that the area contained seawater and sometimes we saw the remains of freshwater deposits. That alternation of layers led me to believe that some revolutions or catastrophic events must have taken place on the Earth's surface in the past that led to the extinction of existing fauna. The development of the earth therefore in principle stands still, but now and then changes completely due to a revolution or catastrophe, such as the deluge. Some animals die as a result, while other beasts escape the dance of death. This also explains why not every layer of the earth contains the same kind of fossils. Incidentally, these ideas were published in 1825 in Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe, if you want to read more about it.”
Yet people no longer believe in the idea of catastrophism. The idea of evolution is now widely recognized. Its creator, Charles Darwin, even thanks you for your meticulous work in his book on the origin of species. What do you think?
“I'm flattered that this man finds my work interesting, but I don't believe in evolution. My compatriot Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck also came up with these crazy ideas that forces can produce organs. According to him, a giraffe gets a longer neck by reaching for high leaves long enough, but that is of course nonsense. If these gentlemen had spent even a little longer looking at something as simple as a spring, let alone something as complicated as an organ, they should have realized that they are talking nonsense. If they want to convince me they will have to come up with better evidence.”