The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin (book)

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The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024...ate-change

INTRO: Shortly after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, in 1859 he started reading a little-known 100-year-old work by a wealthy French aristocrat.

Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages [of his book] are laughably like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words.”

In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.

Now a new book will attempt to shine a light on the French naturalist’s extraordinary achievements and groundbreaking ideas, which date back to the 1740s. “Buffon was one of the very first people to postulate the change of species over time,” said Jason Roberts, author of a new book, Every Living Thing, which will be published next week, on 11 April. “He did not call it evolution – that word was coined later – but he was one of the first people to talk about it and suggest there was some kind of system.”

In Histoire Naturelle, a ­36-volume book Buffon worked on for 50 years, he also put forward the idea that animals were becoming extinct at a time when most natural historians believed that “God would never allow any species to ever disappear or arise over time”, according to Roberts. “The concept of species change and extinction was very controversial.”

Similarly, Buffon’s observations about reproduction anticipated the discovery of DNA: “He suggested there had to be some kind of internal shaping mechanism – that life exists on an organic cellular level and there has to be some kind of recipe or ‘internal mould’ that reproduction follows, to assemble the building blocks of cells into a particular kind of organism.”

After inheriting a fortune from a distant relative, equivalent to about £28m today, Buffon used some of his wealth to turn a ­100-acre park he owned in Burgundy into an “environmental laboratory”, where he “let things go wild and then observed what happened”, Roberts said.

“He has actually been described as the world’s first ecologist, because he was the first person to really study a species in its own environment, and not just a specimen of a dead organism.” (MORE - details)

[Yazata]

I don't think that Buffon really understood evolution. He wasn't little known either, he was famous in 18th century France and some of his books were best sellers of the time.

That being said, he was an important step in the development of evolutionary thinking.

His writings were notable for their entirely naturalistic account of the history of life. He adhered to some ideas current in his time and hypothesized that the sun is hot incandescent iron and that the earth was a fragment of the sun knocked out by a comet. And he tried to calculate how long it would take for iron as big as the earth to cool to room temperature. His calculations were a minimum of 75,000 years. But he apparently thought that the earth was considerably older than that, perhaps more than a million years old.

He knew about fossil mammoths and knew that they resembled elephants, so he hypothesized that elephants once lived in polar regions when the earth was warmer and gradually migrated to the tropics as it cooled.

As for life, Buffon thought of species like the creationists do, as permanent fixed kinds. Each species had a kind of internal mould that shaped its form and development. Thus the result of two humans mating will always be a human and two dogs mating will always be dogs.

He had trouble accepting the common ancestry of apes and humans, and gradually came to hypothesize that the internal moulds could become damaged and accumulate errors, so that apes might be thought of as corrupted men. That led to him to hypothesizing (on the model of animal breeding in his time) that an initial set of forms might transform to produce a whole collection of varieties, and interpreted horses, zebras, donkeys etc. as varieties of some ancient paradigmatic equine form.

Perhaps the biggest difference between Buffon and Darwin and Wallace was that Buffon never seems to have really hit on the generation of new species by natural selection. Of course Darwin and Wallace couldn't really explain how natural selection changed the internal mould that governs fetal development so that new species bred true and produced more of their evolved phenotypic kinds. That explanation required the appearance of molecular genetics and evolutionary developmental biology in the second half of the 20th century.