This mathematician proposed the idea of ​​species evolution a hundred years earlier than Darwin!

In 1859, Darwin published his magnum opus, The Origin of Species. Soon after, he began reading Natural History, a work written 100 years earlier by the French nobleman Count Buffon. He found the content quite astonishing. "In Buffon's book, whole pages are filled with contents that are astonishingly similar to mine. How surprising it is to see another person expressing his own ideas in words," Darwin wrote to a friend.

Thus, in later editions of On the Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged that Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon, was one of the few people who had understood the change and evolution of species before he did.

Written by | Mumu

1707 was the 46th year of Emperor Kangxi's reign, which sounds far away enough. At that time, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland had just merged into the Kingdom of Great Britain, and people still believed that God created humans and all things, and that species were fixed and unchanging. Darwin was not born until more than a hundred years later.

On September 7 of that year, Georges-Louis Leclerc was born in Montbard, Burgundy, France. His father was a minor official in charge of salt tax, and his mother was also from a civil servant family. This seemed to be equivalent to an ordinary middle-class family.

But in 1714, George's godfather and George's mother's uncle, Georges Blaisot, died. Since Blaisot had no children, he left a considerable inheritance to his seven-year-old godson, George the Younger, which is equivalent to about 28 million pounds today.

This was the "1% of luck" that would lead George to genius in the future. In the following years, George began to study law, mathematics, and medicine, traveled across Europe to see the world, pursued science and became richer and richer, and met intellectuals like Voltaire, as well as the upper class and mathematicians of the time.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, portrait of Count Buffon | Source: Wikipedia

By paying 99% of his sweat, Georges the Younger (later known as Count Buffon, because he had an estate called Buffon in Burgundy in eastern France, which the king upgraded to a county in 1772, so he was given the title of count) later became a famous naturalist, mathematician and cosmologist at the time.

His achievements first emerged in the field of mathematics, where he introduced differential and integral calculus into probability theory in his paper Mémoire Sur le jeu de franc-carreau (Memoirs of the Franc-Carreau Game), in which the Buffon needle problem was named after him. This led to his election as a member of the French Academy of Sciences at the age of 26.

Best-selling author and evolutionary thinking

Because Buffon inherited a huge fortune from his godfather and became increasingly wealthy, he was able to use part of his wealth to explore nature.

He turned his 100-acre estate in Burgundy into a large "natural environment laboratory" where he let everything develop naturally and then observed what happened.

In 1739, Buffon was appointed director of the Jardin du Roi (now known as the Paris Botanical Garden) in Paris, a position he held until the end of his life. During this time, he transformed the Jardin du Roi into an important research center and museum, expanding it, purchasing adjacent land, and spending a huge amount of money to collect various plant and animal specimens from all over the world.

According to records, Buffon would spend a lot of money to buy various live animals so that he could actually observe and interact with them. He would observe everything that happened in his "natural environment laboratory", from how foxes reproduced to how birds built nests. Buffon is therefore considered the world's first ecologist because he was the first scientist to truly study biological species in a real natural environment.

In 1749 Buffon began writing Histoire Naturelle, générale et pariculière, with the description of the Cabinet of Roi, which he continued until his death in 1788.

It was a 36-volume encyclopedic work covering all the "natural sciences" known at the time.

It has to be said that Buffon had an amazing talent for writing. Some people commented that the writing style of the book "Natural History" was very good, and every educated person in Europe at that time had read this book. Moreover, "Natural History" was translated into many different languages, making Buffon one of the most widely read writers at that time, with sales and popularity comparable to Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire at that time.

1774 edition of "Natural History" Volumes 1-12 | Source: Wikipedia

Of course, the greatest scientific contribution of this masterpiece, which Buffon spent nearly 50 years writing, was that it proposed a view of species evolution that ran counter to the popular theory at the time.

Because in the 18th century and before, almost all mainstream views believed that all living things were created by God, arranged in order from high to low, with humans at the top. This idea that "God created humans and all things, and species are fixed and unchanging" is also an unchallengeable theological authority.

For example, Buffon, who studied a large number of animal and plant specimens, discovered that there are extremely subtle differences and continuity between individual species in nature. In the process of observing the natural world, he pointed out that despite having similar environments, different plants and animals appear in different regions. This is the famous Buffon's law, which is also considered the first principle of biogeography.

He also proposed that a species could be either "improved" or "degraded" after leaving its center of origin. He asserted that climate change could have facilitated the spread of species from their center of origin to the world. Moreover, he proposed that some animal species were becoming extinct, at a time when most natural historians believed that "God would never allow any species to disappear or appear over time."

In "Natural History", Buffon even explicitly put forward the theory that "given enough time, nature can develop all other kinds of organisms from one primitive species type."

In addition, Buffon's observations on species reproduction also implied the later discovery of DNA. He believed that life existed at the level of organic cells, and there must be some internal shaping mechanism, some formula or internal mold that species reproduction follows to assemble the building blocks of cells into specific types of organisms.

A century-old pioneer

Although Buffon was already a scholar of high status at the time, it is certain that many of his views were still criticized by all walks of life.

Even though he did not provide the key insights and sufficient evidence that Darwin and others did later, Buffon had already realized that new species would inevitably appear and change over time, and some species would inevitably become extinct. He also very clearly included the idea of ​​"species variability and evolution" in his works.

That alone was a very, very radical idea at the time. Buffon was censured by the Sorbonne for it. He even had to write a public statement renouncing everything he had written in the book.

Controversially for Europeans of his time, Buffon did not believe that Europe was the cradle of civilization. He also speculated that the first humans might have been dark-skinned Africans, though he did not specify where they originated.

Moreover, Buffon questioned the Bible's record 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 believed that the history of the earth is at least 75,000 years, or even millions of years. Because he believed that if species want to change, we must accept the assumption that the earth has millions of years of history.

But because he suggested that the earth was older than the Bible, he was accused of heresy, severely condemned by the church, and his books were burned. He also had to make some concessions. For example, after writing his view that "in order for species to change, one must imagine that the earth is millions of years old, and hopefully one day people will be ready to hear this," he had to add a sentence: "Of course, this is a ridiculous speculation. The Bible tells us otherwise."

For this reason, in Buffon's book, he had to downplay the expression of his own observations and thoughts, so that later Victorian naturalists could easily ignore his contributions.

Soon after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, On the Origin of Species, in 1859, he began reading the work of this little-known French nobleman, who had written 100 years earlier.

Darwin found the contents of Natural History quite astonishing. “In Buffon’s book there are whole pages with a striking resemblance to my own. How surprising it is to see another man express his own ideas in words,” Darwin wrote to a friend.

Thus, in later editions of On the Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged that Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Count of Buffon, was one of the few people who had understood the change and evolution of species before Darwin himself.

Although Buffon did not use the word "evolution" at the time, it still cannot shake his status as the enlightener of evolutionary thought. Of course, Buffon did not really understand how species evolution occurred at the time. It was not until Darwin's theory of natural selection that this process was truly explained.

How should we commemorate him?

In 1782, Buffon was elected an honorary foreign 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-Montbard.

During the French Revolution, his tomb was opened and the lead from his 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 later lost. Today, Buffon's cerebellum is preserved in the base of a statue located in the Natural History Museum in Paris. The statue was commissioned by Louis XVI in 1776 to commemorate Buffon and was created by French sculptor Augustin Pajou in the Paris Botanical Garden where Buffon once presided.

The Buffon statue on the lawn of the Botanical Garden in Paris, France | Source: Wikipedia

In 2007, on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of Buffon's birth, the French Museum of Natural History, 93 natural history research institutions and museums from 36 countries, and 200 scholars signed a declaration, the Buffon Declaration, to commemorate "one of the great founders of the scientific study of the diversity of life."

Ernst Walter Mayr, a famous evolutionary biologist and historian of science, believes that Buffon was the father of all natural history thinking in the second half of the 18th century. "He was not an evolutionary biologist, but he was the father of the theory of evolution. He was the first person to discuss a large number of evolutionary problems that had never been raised by anyone before Buffon... He brought these problems to the attention of the scientific community."

Historian Otis Fellows has written that Buffon asked most of the questions that science has been struggling to answer. "His contribution lies in what he prepared for his successors: the 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 successive appearance of new species, the unity of the human race."

Writer Jason Roberts attempts to reveal the extraordinary achievements and groundbreaking ideas of this French naturalist through his new book Every Living Thing, and hopes to make everyone re-understand Buffon's position in history.

"We all know the challenges and difficulties Darwin faced in 1859 when he proposed his ideas about the evolution of species. Imagine if those ideas had been proposed in 1759?"

References

[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

Produced by: Science Popularization China

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