In 1859, Darwin published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species. Soon after, he began to read the book "Natural History" written 100 years earlier by the French nobleman Count Buffon. He found the contents quite surprising. "In Buffon's book, the whole page bears a striking resemblance to mine. What an astonishment it is to see another person put their point in words. Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend.
Thus, in a subsequent edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledges that Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, was one of the few people who understood the change and evolution of species before he himself.
撰文 | Trees
The year 1707 is the forty-sixth year of Kangxi, and this year sounds distant enough. At that time, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland had just merged to form the Kingdom of Great Britain, and it was believed that God created man and all things, and that species were fixed and unchanging. Darwin, on the other hand, was not born until more than a hundred years later.
On September 7 of that year, Georges-Louis Leclerc was born in Montbar, in the French province of Burgundy, to a father who was a petty local official in charge of the salt tax and his mother was also a civil servant. This seems to be equivalent to an ordinary middle-class family.
But in 1714, Georges Blaisot, Georges' godfather and uncle to Georges' mother, died, leaving his seven-year-old godson, George Jr., with no heirs, leaving him a sizable inheritance, which today amounts to about £28 million.
This can be described as the "1% luck" of little George on the road to genius in the future. In the following years, George Jr. began to study law, mathematics, and medicine, began to travel across Europe to see the world, began to pursue science and became richer and richer, and began to meet intellectuals like Voltaire, as well as the upper echelons of society and mathematicians of the time.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Portrait of the Comte de Buffon丨Source: Wikipedia
Through 99% of his efforts, the Comte de Buffon (later George the Younger, because he still had a manor in Burgundy in eastern France, which was upgraded to county by the king in 1772, and thus he received the title of count) became a famous naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist of his time.
His achievements first came to prominence in the field of mathematics, including the introduction of differentiation and integration into the theory of probability in his essay Mémoire Sur le jeu de franc-carreau (Memoirs on the Franco-Carlo Game), after which Buffon's needle problem was named. This led him to be elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences at the age of 26.
Best-selling author and evolutionary thought
The huge fortune that Buffon inherited from his godfather, combined with his growing wealth, allowed him to devote some of his wealth to the exploration of nature.
He turned his 100-acre estate in Burgundy into a large "laboratory for the natural environment". There, he let everything develop naturally, and then observed what happened.
In 1739, Buffon was appointed steward of the Jardin du Roi (now known as the Jardin des Plantes) in Paris, a position he held until the end of his life. During this time, he transformed the King's Garden into an important research center and museum, and continued to expand in size, buying adjoining land and collecting a variety of plant and animal specimens from all over the world.
According to sources, Buffon would spend a lot of money on various live animals so that he could realistically observe them and interact with them. In his "natural environment laboratory", he observes everything that happens, from how foxes breed to how birds build nests. Buffon is therefore considered the world's first ecologist, as he was the first scientist to actually study biological species in a real natural environment.
1749年,布丰开始撰写《自然史》(Natural, General and Particular History, with the Description of the King's Cabinet),直到1788年他去世。
It was an encyclopedic tome of 36 volumes, covering the "natural sciences" known at the time.
It has to be said that Buffon has an amazing talent for writing. It has been commented that the book "Natural History" was written in such a good style that every educated person in Europe at that time had read it. Moreover, the Natural History was translated into many different languages, making Buffon one of the most widely read writers of his time, with sales and popularity comparable to Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire of the time.
The 1774 edition of Natural History, volumes 1-12丨Source: Wikipedia
Of course, the greatest scientific contribution of this magnum opus, written by Buffon over the course of nearly 50 years, was to propose a view of species evolution that ran counter to popular theories at the time.
Because in the 18th century and before, almost all the mainstream view was that all beings were created by God, in order from highest to lowest, with man at the top. This notion that God created man and all things, and that species are fixed and unchanging, is also a theological authority that cannot be challenged.
For example, Bufon, who studied a large number of animal and plant specimens, found that there are extremely subtle differences and continuities between individual species in nature. In his observation of the natural world, he pointed out that despite having similar environments, different plants and animals can occur in different regions, which is known as Buffon's law, which is also considered the first principle of biogeography.
He also suggested that a species can be both "improved" and "degraded" after it leaves the environment of its center of origin. He asserts that climate change may have contributed to the spread of species from their centers of origin to the world. Moreover, he also made the idea that some animal species were becoming extinct, and most natural historians at the time believed that "God would never allow any species to disappear or appear over time."
In the Natural History, Buffon even explicitly put forward the theory that "with enough time, nature can develop all other species from one primitive species".
In addition, Buffon's observations of the reproduction of species also implied the discovery of DNA in later generations. He believed that life exists at the level of organic cells, and that there must be some kind of internal shaping mechanism, some kind of formula or internal mold, for the reproduction of species to follow it, to assemble the building blocks of the cell into specific types of organisms.
A pioneer in the past century
Although Buffon was already a scholar with a high status at that time, it is certain that many of Buffon's views at that time were still criticized by all walks of life.
Even if he did not provide critical insights and sufficient evidence as Darwin and others would later do, Buffon had already realized that new species were bound to emerge and change over time, and some species were bound to become extinct. His writings have also very clearly included the idea of "species variability and evolution".
That alone was a very, very radical idea at the time. Buffon was also condemned by the Sorbonne for this. He even had to write a public statement abandoning everything he had written in the book.
Controversially for Europeans of his time, Buffon did not believe that Europe was the cradle of human civilization. In addition, Buffon speculates that the first humans may have been dark-skinned Africans, although he does not specify the region of human origin.
Moreover, Buffon questioned the Bible's account of the history of the earth. In the biblical narrative, the world we live in is only 6,000 years old since the creation of the world, but Buffon argues that the history of the earth is at least 75,000 years, if not millions of years. Because he thinks that if species want to change, we have to accept the assumption that the Earth is millions of years old.
But it was precisely because he implied that the history of the earth was older than the Bible recorded, accused of heresy, severely condemned by the church, and books were burned. He also had to make a false concession and give in slightly. For example, after he wrote down his opinion that "for the sake of species change, one must imagine that the earth is millions of years old, and hopefully one day in the future people will be ready to hear this", he had to add the sentence "Of course, this is ridiculous speculation." That's not what the Bible tells us. ”
Because of this, in Buffon's book, he had to weaken the expression of his own observations and thoughts, so that later Victorian naturalists could easily ignore his contributions.
In 1859, Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species. Soon after, Darwin began reading the writings of this little-known French aristocrat 100 years ago.
Darwin found the content of the Natural History to be quite surprising. "In Buffon's book, the whole page bears a striking resemblance to mine. What an astonishment it is to see another person put their point in words. Darwin wrote in a letter to a friend.
Thus, in a subsequent edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledges that Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, was one of the few people who understood the change and evolution of species before Darwin himself.
Although Buffon did not use the word "evolution" at the time, it still could not shake his position as an enlightener of evolutionary thought. Of course, Buffon didn't really understand exactly how species evolved at the time, and it wasn't until Darwin's theory of natural selection that this process was really elucidated.
How can we remember him?
In 1782, Buffon was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Buffon died in Paris in 1788 and was buried in a chapel next to the church of Saint-Jules Montbar.
During the French Revolution, his tomb was opened and the lead from the coffin was looted to make bullets. His son, George-Louie-Marie Buffon, was guillotined on July 10, 1794.
Buffon's heart and cerebellum were initially preserved, but were later accidentally lost. Today, Buffon's cerebellum is preserved in the base of the statue, located in the Natural History Museum in Paris. The statue was commissioned by Louis XVI in 1776 to commemorate Buffon by the French sculptor Augustin Pajou, and is located in the Jardin des Plantes de Paris, where Buffon once spent.
The statue of Buffon on the lawn in the Botanical Garden in Paris, France丨Source: Wikipedia
In 2007, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Buffon's birth, the French Museum of Natural History, together with 93 natural history institutes and museums and 200 scholars from 36 countries, signed a declaration, The Buffon Declaration, on the importance of science for the sustainability of biodiversity and the survival of humanity.
Ernst Walter Mayr, a well-known evolutionary biologist and historian of science, argues that Buffon was the initiator of all natural history ideas in the second half of the 18th century. "He was not an evolutionary biologist, but he was the father of evolution. He was the first to discuss a large number of evolutionary issues that had never been raised by anyone before Buffon...... He brought these issues to the attention of the scientific community. ”
Historian Otis Fellows has written that Buffon raises most of the questions that science has been trying to answer. "His contribution lies in what he has in store for his successors: bold and groundbreaking ideas about the origin of life, the laws of geographical distribution, the geological record of the evolution of the earth, the extinction of old species, the emergence of new ones, the unification of the human race."
Writer Jason Roberts has tried to reveal the extraordinary achievements and pioneering ideas of the French naturalist through his new book, Every Living Thing, and hopes to re-understand Buffon's place in history -
"It is well known that in 1859 Darwin faced the challenges and difficulties in proposing the idea of the evolution of species. Imagine if those ideas had been proposed in 1759? ”
Resources
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges-Louis_Leclerc,_Comte_de_Buffon
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histoire_Naturelle
[3] https://www.airitilibrary.com/Article/Detail/P20150629002-201509-201609120012-201609120012-54-61
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/apr/07/the-french-aristocrat-who-understood-evolution-100-years-before-darwin-and-even-worried-about-climate-change
Producer: Popular Science China
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