Georges Cuvier

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Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier (1769–1832)

Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron de Cuvier (actually Jean-Léopold-Nicholas Frédéric Cuvier; born August 23, 1769 in Mömpelgard (now Montbéliard) ; † May 13, 1832 in Paris ), was a French naturalist and co-founder of zoology as a comparative Anatomy .

Life

Georges Cuvier came from a Lutheran family from the then Württemberg county of Mömpelgard . He was the son of Jean Georges Cuvier (1716–1795), a former lieutenant in a Swiss regiment, and Anne-Clémence Catherine Châtel (1736–1792). He was baptized with the first name Jean-Léopold-Nicholas Frédéric, later the first name Dagobert was added. From then on, Cuvier took the first name of his older brother Georges Charles Henri (1765-1767) as his sole first name. The zoologist Frédéric Cuvier was his younger brother.

As a child he read the complete works of Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon and at the age of twelve he started his first natural history collection. From 1784 to 1788 Cuvier studied at the Hohen Karlsschule in Stuttgart , where he mainly took courses in administrative, legal and economic sciences. During this time he befriended Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer , from whom he learned dissection .

In 1787 he was appointed Chevalier (German knight), which gave him access to high society. After studying at the High Charles School, Cuvier found a job as a private tutor for the Count d'Héricy in Normandy for eight years . In his spare time he devoted himself to natural history studies, in which he examined plants, sea birds and marine animals. Henri-Alexandre Tessier and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire recommended that Cuvier be appointed to the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle in Paris, and in 1795 he became a member of the Société d'histoire naturelle . Hilaire, who was professor of "Mammals, Cetaceans, Birds, Reptiles and Fish" there, followed this recommendation. In the same year Cuvier became a member of the newly established Institut de France .

During the absence of Geoffroy due to the Egyptian campaign , Cuvier gained influence among the zoologists at the museum . In 1800 he became professor of zoology and in 1803 secretary of physical sciences at the Collège de France . In 1801 he was elected a foreign member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences . On April 17, 1806, the Royal Society accepted him as a member. In 1808 he was elected a foreign member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . On behalf of Napoléon, he reorganized the academic institutes in Italy, the Netherlands and southern Germany and was awarded the Order of Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur for his services in 1811 . In 1814 he was appointed Conseil d'État . In 1813 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh . In 1822 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . Shortly before his death he rose to the rank of peer of France .

In 1804 Cuvier married the widow Duvaucel, who brought four children into the marriage and with whom he had four more children. Georges Cuvier died in 1832 of complications from a cholera infection. He was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris .

The final resting place of George Cuvier, in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris

plant

Georges Cuvier is considered to be the scientific founder of paleontology and made comparative anatomy a research discipline. He studied the anatomy of different living things and systematically compared all similarities and differences. These studies enabled him to deduce the shape of other bones and their muscles from the existence of some bones. So he finally succeeded in reconstructing an entire animal body from just a few parts.

Cuvier's students included Alcide Dessalines d'Orbigny , Achille Valenciennes , Gotthelf Fischer von Waldheim , Henri Marie Ducrotay de Blainville and Franco Andrea Bonelli .

His investigations from around 1803 were particularly concerned with

  1. the structure of the mollusks ( Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire et a l'anatomie des mollusques , German history and anatomy of the mollusks , 1817)
  2. the comparative anatomy and species classification of fish ( Histoire naturelle des poissons , German natural history of fish 1828–1831)
  3. the fossils of reptiles and mammals as well as the osteology of recent living things.

On the third area, Cuvier published a flood of treatises that document his extraordinary powers of observation and his precise conclusions. Through his geognostic investigations of the Paris basin , he first came up with the idea that alternating floods of fresh and sea water must have changed the earth's surface ( transgression ). Summaries of these works are the Recherches sur les ossements fossiles de quadrupèdes (German: Investigations on fossil bones of four-legged friends 1812) and the Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe (German: Discourse on changes in the earth's surface 1825). In his four-volume work Le règne animal distribué d'après son organization (German: The animal kingdom divided according to design, 1817) he divided the animal kingdom into four unchangeable groups, which he called vertebrates (vertebrata), molluscs (mollusca), and radiant animals (radiata) and articulated animals (Articulata), and to which he assigned their own basic blueprint. His conscientious investigations into the sequence of layers and the fossils contained in them led to the proof that living things (and whole species) can become extinct. This had been denied in principle by Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire .

He was equally important as a collector of natural history objects, as a systematic researcher, teacher and educational politician. The school system and the Protestant Church in France owe him a great deal.

catastrophism

Cuvier has long been considered the best-known proponent of cataclysmism ( cataclysm theory ), according to which major catastrophes repeatedly destroyed a large part of living beings in the history of the earth and new life emerged from the remaining species in subsequent phases. In 1808, together with the French naturalist Alexandre Brongniart, Cuvier structured the geological stratification in the Paris Basin (earlier Cenozoic or Tertiary ). They examined the fossils in the individual layers of the earth. They discovered a sequence of a total of seven fossil fauna , with each fauna of a certain layer being replaced by another fauna in the next layer and thus disappearing. Between each of the successive terrestrial fossil faunas, however, there were layers that contained marine mollusks, so that freshwater and seawater deposits alternated.

Cuvier concluded that these gaps must be indicative of global catastrophes. He suspected that the ocean had spread from the north towards the Paris Basin, wiping out land mammals and subsequently bringing marine organisms with it. After the sea retreated, land mammals reappeared. Cuvier generalized that these global catastrophes in the earth's history repeatedly destroyed life and then led to a new beginning. He was a child of the French Enlightenment ; dogmatic-theological theses within the natural sciences would have been anathema to him. The legend that Cuvier postulated a new creation by God after every catastrophe was spread by his opponent Charles Lyell . None of Cuvier's many publications can substantiate this claim. Equally untenable is the assumption that Cuvier still believed that the history of the earth would last based on biblical ideas.

Cuvier used his outstanding knowledge of anatomy to ideally complement missing fossilized bones to form a complete skeleton. He combined his discovery of a faunal section based on fossils with his rejection of the gradualistic evolutionary theory of Jean Baptiste Lamarck .

The Paris academy dispute

The best-known scientific opponent Cuvier was Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire , with whom he had started as an assistant . The Paris academy dispute of 1830 became famous, in which not only the catastrophe theory played a role, but also the question of whether natural history followed a uniform construction plan (Saint-Hilaire) or several fundamentally different ones (Cuvier).

For a long time Cuvier was considered backward due to Lyell's attacks and his rejection of the theory of continuous evolution ( gradualism ), but the theory of evolution was still controversially discussed among Cuvier's scientific contemporaries. Today it is undisputed that, in addition to gradual change, catastrophic events were also decisive for the history of life - such as the earth-spanning catastrophe around 66 million years ago on the Cretaceous-Paleogene border , which is held responsible for the mass extinction at the end of the Mesozoic Era .

Honors

Georges Cuvier is listed among the 72 names of eminent people on the Eiffel Tower . The Cuvier Canyon deep-sea trench , the Cuvier lunar crater and the asteroid (9614) Cuvier are named after him. The reptile species Anolis cuvieri , Bachia cuvieri and Oplurus cuvieri , the tiger shark Galeocerdo cuvier and the mammalian species Proechimys cuvieri are also named after Georges Cuvier. The bird species Regulus cuvieri , Phaeochroa cuvierii and Ramphastos tucanus cuvieri are named either after him or his brother Frédéric. The plant genus Cuviera Koeler from the sweet grass family (Poaceae) is named after Cuvier . In 1820 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . Cuvier is the namesake for Cuvier Island in Antarctica.

A zoological society that existed in Paris from 1838 to around 1848 was named after him ( Société cuvierienne ).

Fonts (selection)

  • Mémoire sur la structure external et intern et sur les affinités des animaux auxquels on a donné le nom de ver. In: La Décade philosophique, litteraire et politique. Vol. 5, H. 40 (May 29, 1795), pp. 385-396 ( digitized version ).
  • Tableau élémentaire de l'histoire naturelle des animaux . Paris 1798.
  • Leçons d'anatomie comparée. 5 volumes. Paris 1798–1805 (German: Lectures on comparative anatomy . Volumes 1 and 2, Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1801–1802; Volumes 1–4, Kummer, Leipzig, 1809–1810); 2nd Edition. 8 volumes. Crochard, Paris 1835-1846.
  • Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire et a l'anatomie des mollusques . Deterville, Paris 1817 ( digitized ).
  • Le règne animal; distribué d'après son organization; for the service of the base of the history of the animaux et d'introduction of the anatomy comparée . 4 volumes. Paris 1817 (German: Das Thierreich, arranged according to its organization: as the basis of the natural history of animals and introduction to comparative anatomy . 6 volumes. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1831–1843).
  • Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles ou l'on rétablit les caractères de plusieurs animaux dont les révolutions du globe ont détruit les espèces . 4 volumes. Dufour et d'Ocagne, Paris 1812; 4th edition. 12 volumes. Paris 1835-1837.
  • Discours sur les Révolutions de la surface du Globe, et sur les changemens qu'elles ont produits dans le règne animal . Dufour et d'Ocagne, Paris 1825 (German: Cuvier's views of the primeval world. Weber, Bonn 1822; The upheavals of the earth's crust in a scientific and historical context. 2nd edition. 2 volumes. Weber, Bonn 1830).

proof

literature

  • Olivier Rieppel: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) . 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. 139-156.
  • Philippe Taquet: Georges Cuvier: Naissance d'un génie . Odile Jacob, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-7381-0969-1 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Philippe Taquet: Georges Cuvier: Naissance d'un génie. ISBN 2-7381-0969-1 , pp. 8, 31-32.
  2. 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, Vol. 246 = Treatises of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen, Mathematical-Physical Class. Episode 3, vol. 50). Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2001, ISBN 3-525-82516-1 , p. 64.
  3. Member entry of Georges Cuvier (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 3, 2016.
  4. ^ Fellows Directory. Biographical Index: Former RSE Fellows 1783–2002. Royal Society of Edinburgh, accessed October 19, 2019 .
  5. Gerhard Schurz: Evolution in nature and culture: An introduction to the generalized theory of evolution. Springer, 2012, ISBN 978-3-8274-3118-9 .
  6. ^ Philippe Taquet: Georges Cuvier: Naissance d'un génie. Odile Jacob, Paris 2006, ISBN 2-7381-0969-1 , p. 376.
  7. Steven M. Stanley: Historical Geology. Spektrum Akademischer Verlag, Heidelberg Berlin (2001) ISBN 3-8274-0569-6 , p. 141.
  8. Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2011, ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5 , p. 63.
  9. Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Mammals . Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore 2009, ISBN 978-0-8018-9304-9 , p. 94.
  10. Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins: Whose Bird? Men and Women Commemorated in the Common Names of Birds . Christopher Helm Publishers, 2003, ISBN 0-7136-6647-1 , p. 96.
  11. Lotte Burkhardt: Directory of eponymous plant names - Extended Edition. Part I and II. Botanic Garden and Botanical Museum Berlin , Freie Universität Berlin , Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-946292-26-5 doi: 10.3372 / epolist2018 .
  12. Member entry of Georges Cuvier at the German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina , accessed on February 3, 2016.

Further literature

Modern
  • Toby A. Appel: The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin . Oxford University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-19-504138-0 .
  • William Coleman: Georges Cuvier, zoologist: a study in the history of evolution theory . Harvard University Press, 1964.
  • Howard Elias Negrin: Georges Cuvier: Administrator and educator . New York University, 1977.
  • Dorinda Outram: Georges Cuvier: Vocation, Science, and Authority in Post-Revolutionary France . Manchester University Press, Manchester 1984, ISBN 0-7190-1077-2 .
  • Martin JS Rudwick : Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts . University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1997 ISBN 0-226-73106-5 .
  • Jean Chandler Smith: Georges Cuvier. An annotated bibliography of his published works . Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993, ISBN 1-56098-199-7 .
Older
  • WFG Behn (ed.): Letters to CH Pfaff: from the years 1788 to 1792, natural historical, political and literary content . Schwers, Kiel 1845. (online)
  • Pierre Flourens: Histoire des travaux de Georges Cuvier . 3. Edition. Garnier, Paris 1858. (online)
  • Sarah Lee: Mémoires du baron Georges Cuvier . H. Fournier, 1833. (online)

Web links

Commons : Georges Cuvier  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Georges Cuvier  - Sources and full texts