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History of Science

Adrià Casinos

Before Darwin

13 may 2010

The lives of the naturalist Georges Cuvier, the father of comparative anatomy, and of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel shared several similarities. Contemporaries, both men were born and died almost at the exact same time, they enjoyed mutual friends, were subjects of the same state of the old regime (Württemberg), and suffered from unpopularity for reasons often having nothing at all to do with science. These coincidences and their common battle with the German school of Naturphilosophie, convinced me to construct an intertwined biography of both men, Las vidas paralelas de Georges Cuvier y Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Naturaleza y filosofía, recovering the old structure of parallel lives.

Several years ago, Stephen Jay Gould popularized the phrase “ever since Darwin.” Perhaps we should understand this expression meaning a turning point, not a starting point. A reading of The Origin of Species makes this clear. Using the hypothesis of “descent with modification,” Charles Darwin reinterpreted a large number of ideas put forward from what we might call the “pre-evolutionary stage.”

This becomes evident when regarding Georges Cuvier and what were, perhaps, his two most tightly-held concepts: the “unity of type” (as opposed to the classical string scala naturae or the “great chain of being”) and “conditions of existence.” Indeed, Cuvier believed that one thing was the functional interpretation of the structures and quite another was their transformational capacity. He saw the animal as a whole, and any alteration in the form-function complex would negatively influence its conditions of existence, leading to its disappearance. So, when on page 206 of the first edition of Darwin's work he examines the subject, the author does not hesitate to bestow the status of law on both principles of the “Illustrious Cuvier,” adding that the second “is the higher law.” However, Darwin reinterpreted the concepts. The “unity of type” is explained as “unity of descent,” while the “conditions of existence” are completely engulfed by the principle of natural selection.

Most of the seeds of evolutionary theory appeared in the period before the publication of The Origin of Species I have always thought the pre-evolutionary stage is of great interest. Most of the seeds of evolutionary theory appeared in the period before the publication of The Origin of Species. In the case of Georges Cuvier, the choice of the figure for my book was influenced by my time working in the laboratory of comparative anatomy at the Musée Nacional in Paris, founded by Cuvier, and by my long-standing collaboration with colleagues (and friends) in the laboratory. The choice is also based on the fact that Cuvier was treated very poorly by critics that came after him.

I am not saying that his figure and his work are not deserving of a close reading. But, objectivity must be maintained. His unquestionable political opportunism can not be an argument against his scientific work. Also in territory that is not strictly scientific, it is untenable the claim that Cuvier believed that all organisms were static due to some sort of religious fanaticism (there is no indication that he was a godly man, in fact, it seems he was anything but). Nor can his polemic with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire be simply interpreted as a clash between an anti-evolutionist (Cuvier) and an evolutionist (Saint-Hilaire). Many of the ideas that the latter defended, and Cuvier criticized, were later to be seen as quite ridiculous in the context of positive science. Finally, and above all, you can not condemn his criticism of Naturphilosophie, a movement oozing with irrational idealism and claims of holistic scientific explanation (a criticism made by Cuvier from a completely empirical perspective).

It is on this last point that I associated, in my book, Cuvier with the figure of Hegel, the counterpoint of the first in the opposition to Naturphilosophen. Although the German philosopher's attitude was very different; it was simply about being coherently idealistic. Nothing material, like nature, could oppose the idea.

However, Cuvier’s, let’s call it, anti-evolutionist position deserves a few more comments, and it should be judged in the context of the transformists’ ideas that he would have been aware of. Undoubtedly, the most complete and coherent evolutionary work, from the point of view of its clarity of ideas, before The Origin of Species, was Jean Baptist de Lamarck's Zoological Philosophy. There exists a huge gulf between the two works, not so much from the perspective of the proposed mechanisms, with the exception of natural selection. At the end of the day Darwin also accepted the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The difference lies mainly in the method of argument; Darwin’s work is an empirical discourse, in which an effort is made to support the hypothesis with evidence, and the more the better, something that is well illustrated when comparing the first and the sixth (and last) editions.

We must also stress that The Origin of Species is a modern work both in conception and structure. If it had been written today, in all likelihood it would not be too different. By contrast, the Zoological Philosophy is a book full of the 18^th century, developed with a very Cartesian scheme and with little concern for empiricism. And this was the kind of argument that Cuvier could not accept and wholeheartedly despised. In my book I explain that few continental European scientists at that moment were as close to the British empirical tradition as Cuvier, who avoided both the idealism of his Germanic education and the Cartesian tradition of French science. I am very far from asserting that if he had read Darwin’s masterwork, Georges Cuvier would have converted to evolutionism, but surely he would have very much appreciated the work simply because this was the kind of science that he liked.

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