Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

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Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (born April 15, 1772 in Étampes , † June 19, 1844 in Paris ) was a French zoologist . His only son was the zoologist Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire .

Life

Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire was born in the village of Étampes near Paris, the youngest of fourteen children. His father Gerard Jean Geoffroy was a lawyer. The young Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (this is his full surname) initially embarked on a career in the church. Hilaire attended the Collège d'Étampes and then studied at the Collège de Navarre in Paris. There, Abbé Henri-Alexandre Tessier (1741–1837) and the botanist Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu promoted his exploration of nature. His original clerical interests shifted abruptly with the beginning of the French Revolution . So he followed his father's recommendation and started studying law. He received his diploma in 1790. In August 1792 various of his teachers and colleagues were arrested by Jacobins ; he undertook - at the risk of his life - an attempt at liberation that only partially succeeded. Later in 1788, he graduated with a degree in theology and was temporarily canon in the parish of Sainte Croix in his hometown. Then he followed his real inclinations towards medicine and the natural sciences and began to study at the Collège du Cardinal Lemoine . It was the events of the professor of natural history Mathurin Jacques Brisson that influenced him, but also many other scientists of his time, René-Just Haüy , Antoine Laurent de Lavoisier and Claude-Louis Berthollet .

He then attended the lectures of Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton at the Collège de France and Antoine François de Fourcroy in the Jardin des Plantes . In March 1793 Louis Jean Marie Daubenton offered him, through the intervention of Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre , the position of assistant candidate sous-garde et d'assistant in the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle . By law passed on June 10, 1793, the original Jardin du Roi (Royal Garden) was converted into the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle , and Hilaire became one of the twelve appointed professors of this newly constituted museum. He was assigned the chair of zoology. In the same year he was engaged in the formation of a menagerie at the facility. There he met the natural historian Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and got the still unknown Georges Cuvier a job as an assistant. Through this trio, the museum had a great influence on the development of paleo-biology in the 19th century, see also the Paris academy dispute of 1830.

Together with Cuvier, Hilaire wrote five articles on natural history ( Sur la classification des mammifères , 1795). In his work Histoire des Makis, ou singes de Madagascar (1796) he first expressed his view of a uniform plan in the history of the development of living things. He accompanied Napoléon Bonaparte's troops from 1798 to 1801 as a scientist to Egypt ( Egyptian expedition ).

In September 1807 he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences and in the same year a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . From 1809 on, he worked intensively on anatomy as a professor of zoology at the University of Paris . The first part of his Philosophy anatomique appeared in 1818 , followed four years later by the second part.

In the later years of his life, Hilaire dealt primarily with organic malformations. In 1840 he went blind, a few months later he suffered a stroke and gave up his office.

Gravestone of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in the Paris Père-Lachaise cemetery (division 19)

Scientific achievements

In the philosophy anatomique (1818-1822) Hilaire developed the theory that the body structure of vertebrates and invertebrates has a common basic plan. Since - in his opinion - there have been no leaps in the development of the species, even organs that have become superfluous should still be found today as rudiments (such as the intermaxillary bone ).

Hilaire tried to analogize the body structure of vertebrates and invertebrates and thus came up with a theory of the unity of the building plan unité de plan , a theory of analogies (modernly referred to as homologies ), from which he concluded that the development of living beings from a single building plan , plan d'organization , could be derived. Because of this hypothesis he got into a dispute with Georges Cuvier , known as the Paris Academy dispute (1830-1832), who postulated a split into four different and independent basic plans in the animal kingdom. The dispute was pursued across Europe, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - with whose views Hilaire largely agreed - intervened. His former colleague G. Cuvier was also an advocate of catastrophe theory or cataclysm theory .

Hilaire discovered many similarities between various vertebrates and came to the conclusion that the birds descended from prehistoric reptiles . He was the first to postulate a continuous development between fossil and modern living beings. On the other hand, he did not believe that there is still species evolution in the present.

Through various experiments, he realized that environmental influences can cause deformities in vertebrate embryos. Together with Johann Friedrich Meckel, he is considered the founder of teratology , the theory of malformations.

In 1822, he suggested that the segments of arthropods and the spine of mammals are each examples of a unified organization plan of the animals. This consideration is absolutely topical with regard to the effect of the Hox genes , a family of regulatory genes whose gene products as transcription factors control the activity of other functionally related genes in the course of individual development (morphogenesis).

In the early 19th century, the biologist Étienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire put forward the thesis that the blueprint of vertebrates is inverted (upside down) compared to invertebrates.

The dorsoventral inversion theory (see also: Theories of twisting ) is also based on his perception that the order of the nervous system, the esophagus, and the blood vessels from the ventral to the dorsal side is reversed in vertebrates and invertebrates.

Through his comparative studies in anatomy, paleontology and embryology, Hilaire gave decisive impulses to the modern theory of evolution .

In addition, he conducted lively correspondence, e. B. with George Sand , who admired him very much. Further friends are u. a. Jules Michelet and Henri de Saint-Simon .

Honors

The mammal species Callithrix geoffroyi , Inia geoffrensis , Ateles geoffroyi , Nyctophilus geoffroyi , Anoura geoffroyi , Dasyurus geoffroyi and Leopardus geoffroyi are named after Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Likewise the bird species Schistes geoffroyi , Neomorphus geoffroyi and Geoffroyus geoffroyi .

Fonts (selection)

  • Philosophy anatomique . 1818.
  • Histoire naturelle des mammifères . 1820-1842. 7 volumes
  • Mémoire sur plusieurs déformations du crâne de l'Homme, suivi d'un essai de classification des monstres acéphales . In: Mem. Museum Hist. Nat. , VII, 1821, pp. 85-162.
  • Des faits anatomiques et physiologiques de l'anencéphalie, observés sur un anencéphale humain né à Paris en mars 1821 . In: Philosophy Anatomique , tome II, 1822, pp. 125–153.
  • Note on un monstre humain (anencéphale) trouvé dans les ruines de Thèbes en Egypte by M. Passalacqua , Arch. Génér. de Médecine, X, 1826, pp. 154-126.
  • Description d'un monstre humain, né avant l'ère chrétienne, et considérations sur le caractère des monstruosités dites anencéphales . In: Ann. Sc. Naturelles , VII, 1826, pp. 357-381.
  • Principes de philosophie zoologique, discussions in mars 1830, au sein de l'Académie royale des sciences . Pichon & Didier, Paris 1830 ( online ).
  • Notions Synthétiques historiques et physiologiques de philosophie naturelle . Paris 1838.

literature

  • Franck Bourdier: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Isidore . In: Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography . Volume 5. Charles Scribner's Sons, Detroit 2008. pp. 358-360 ( online ).
  • Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire : Vie, travaux et doctrine scientifique d'Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire . Bertrand, Paris 1847 (online) .
  • Herve Le Guyader: Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: A Visionary Naturalist . University of Chicago Press, 2004, ISBN 0-226-47091-1 .
  • Alec L. Panchen: Étienne Geoffroy St.-Hilaire: father of "evo-devo"? In: Evolution & Development . Volume 3, Number 1, 2001, pp. 41-46 ( doi: 10.1046 / j.1525-142x.2001.01085.x ).
  • Olivier Rieppel: Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) . In: Ilse Jahn , Michael Schmitt: Darwin & Co. A history of biology in portraits . Volume 1. CH Beck, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-44638-8 , pp. 157-175.

Web links

Commons : Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 11 : Franciscans - Gibson . London 1910, p. 618 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
  2. ↑ American Philosophical Society (English)
  3. ↑ Vie, travaux et doctrine scientifique d'Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire ( Wikisource , French)
  4. ↑ Holger Krahnke: The members of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1751-2001 (= Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Philological-Historical Class. Volume 3, Volume 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Series 3, volume 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 209.
  5. ↑ Étienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire (1772–1844). UCMP Berkeley; Biography
  6. ↑ Pierre Charon: Teratology du tube neural: histoire et Paleopathology. Teratology of the neural tub: history and paleopathology . (PDF; 560 kB) Ecole pratique des hautes études, La Sorbonn.
  7. ^ Biographical note. (English)
  8. ↑ K Nübler-Jung, D Arendt: Is Anterior dorsal insects in vertebrates? . In: .. Roux Arch Dev Biol. . 203, No. 7, 1994, pp. 357-366. doi : 10.1007 / BF00188683 .
  9. ^ Corpus Littéraire Étampois. George Sand: Lettre à Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1837)
  10. ↑ Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2009, ISBN 978-0-8018-9304-9 , p. 150.
personal data
SURNAME Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Etienne
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French zoologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 15, 1772
PLACE OF BIRTH Etampes
DATE OF DEATH June 19, 1844
Place of death Paris