42 History & Philosophy of Geology: 1886 Charleston Earthquake, Carolina Gold Rush and Other Topics

Sunday, 4 November 2012
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
212AB

CHANGE IN NATURE AND THE NATURE OF CHANGE: EVOLUTIONARY THEORY IN POST-REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

Paper number: 42-9
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 3:30 PM – 3:45 PM

Authors

Abstract

The insights that all life has a common ancestor, that diversification occurs through branching, that homology arises from independent modifications of ancestral body types, and that extinction has been a driving force in life’s history, form the core of Darwinian evolutionary theory. However, none of these insights was unique to Charles Darwin. The French naturalists Georges Cuvier, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire proposed them each nearly fifty years earlier. Despite having most of the elements of Darwinian evolution between them, and despite working in close proximity to one another at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, these three naturalists never proposed a coherent theory of evolution that tied them all together.

We used content analysis, a technique common in the social sciences, to analyze the texts of published manuscripts and personal correspondence authored by Cuvier, Lamarck and Geoffroy. These analyses revealed fundamental differences between these authors, specifically in their attitudes concerning change in nature. Furthermore, in the case of Cuvier, we were able to link these attitudes to attitudes regarding political change that he first expressed as a first-hand witness to the French Revolution. We hypothesize that it is these differences in their attitudes on the nature of change, possibly arising from their very different experiences during the Revolution, that kept Cuvier, Lamarck and Geoffroy from putting together a unified theory of evolution very similar to that of Darwin.