It's no surprise that this excellent book received the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and the 2025 PEN America Literary Science Award.
The author juxtaposes the lives of Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and French naturalist George-Louis de Buffon, two men who happened to be born in 1707 and competed to write the catalogue of all living things. The Bible mentions 120 animal species, so both authors tried to list animals, plants and other living things. Linnaeus sets his taxonomy in rigorous categories, static or never-chaning in his opinion, whereas Buffon has a more evolutionary perspective, and in this sense a precursor to scientists of the 19th Century like Wallace and Darwin.
Next to the rivalry itself, Roberts also goes into the right level of detail to give the public and especially the official reaction of the church against the work of both men.
"Acclaim, however, was far from universal. The same Journal of Trévoux that praised the Histoire as a masterstroke against Linnaeus later published a critique angrily taking issue with Buffon's assertion "that it is possible to descend by almost imperceptible gradations from the most perfect of creatures to the most formless matter." The theological implications, it argued, were disturbing: If life was a continuum, there could be no clear leap between ensouled beings and those without souls. so happily placed as to serve as the imperceptible passage from one to the other" (p. 144-145)
"Buffon had his working definition. The essence of species lay in reproduction, the ability of one generation to propagate another. He logically applied this measure to humanity: Since all ethnic groups seemed clearly capable of interbreeding with one another, they comprised a single species. "The dissimilarities are merely external, the alterations of nature but superficial," he concluded. "The Asian, European, and Negro all reproduce with equal ease with the American. There can be no greater proof that they are the issue of a single and identical stock than the facility with which they consolidate to the common stock". In sum, reproduction was proof that
'there was originally but one species, which, after being multiplied and diffused over the whole surface of the earth, underwent diverse changes from the influence of the climate, food, mode of living, epidemical distempers, and the intermixture of individuals ... that at first these alterations were less conspicuous, and confined to individuals; that afterwards, from continued action, they formed specific varieties; that these varieties have been perpetuated from generation to generation" (p.183-184)
It is fascinating to see how reason, logic and science manage to revolutionise ancient thinking and stereotypes, how observation and deductive reasoning could overcome ignorance, and even anticipate scientific insights that we only achieved two centuries later. Buffon's 'moule intérieur' or internal matrix is nothing else than our genetic code.
"Just as species passed from existence, he concluded that they must come into existence as well, throughout the expanse of time. In 1753, the fourth volume of Histoire Naturelle had contained Buffon's observation that while humans and horses were greatly dissimilar from each other in outward appearances, the horse's hoof contained the same inventory of bones as the human hand. This was a "hidden resemblance" that evaded Linnaeus's systematics entirely, and which to Buffon "seems to indicate that in creating these animals the supreme Being wished to employ one idea, and to vary it at the same time in all possible ways."
Buffon thought that these resemblances were more than coincidences. If his postulated shaping internal matrix (moule intérieur) could account for individual variations within species, might it not also be responsible for even larger, inheritable changes? Such changes might accumulate, to the degree that they added up to an entirely new species.(p. 198)
He was also visionary enough to see that humanity was able to create much and advance technologically, but also that our own destruction and environmental damage was a possible consequence:
"In The Epochs of Nature, the 1774 essay both included in Histoire Naturelle and published as a stand-alone volume, Buffon had argued that human-driven environmental change had proceeded to the point that it represented the "seventh and last epoch, when the power of man has assisted that of Nature." This power, he concluded, was not universally positive. "The most despicable condition of the human species is not that of the savage," he wrote,
but that of those nations that are a quarter policed, which have always been the real curse of human nature, and which civilized peoples still have trouble to contain today. They have, as we have said, ravaged the first happy land, they tore out the seeds of contentment ... Cast your eyes on the annals of all the peoples, you will count there twenty centuries of desolation for a few years of peace and repose". (p.353)
Jason Roberts has not only written a wonderful overview of the biological classification of nature in line with the great encyclopedists of the 18th century, but he has positioned it by showing two entirely different approaches to the subject by two fascinating characters, adding tremendous amounts of facts and events that make this a very readible and entertaining read.
It's not only about two men with differing views, it's about the approach to science in general, and how evidence, facts, methodology and logic are the way forward.
Brilliant!
No comments:
Post a Comment