Cuvier Quotes

Evolution is the law of policies: Darwin said it, Socrates endorsed it, Cuvier proved it and established it for all time in his paper on 'The Survival of the Fittest.' These are illustrious names, this is a mighty doctrine: nothing can ever remove it from its firm base, nothing dissolve it, but evolution.

Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere schoolboys to old Aristotle.

In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

The works which this man leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent; and yet his name will shine out with lustre in the history of the sciences. {Cuvier on Joseph Banks}

To seek in the great accumulation of the already-said the text that resembles 'in advance' a later text, to ransack history in order to rediscover the play of anticipations or echoes, to go right back to the first seeds or to go forward to the last traces, to reveal in a work its fidelity to tradition or its irreducible uniqueness, to raise or lower its stock of originality, to say that the Port -Royal grammarians invented nothing, or to discover that Cuvier had more predecessors than one thought, these are harmless enough amusements for historians who refuse to grow up.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.

Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?

Cuvier had even in his address & manner the character of a superior Man, much general power & eloquence in conversation & great variety of information on scientific as well as popular subjects. I should say of him that he is the most distinguished man of talents I have ever known on the continent...

Have you ever plunged into the immensity of space and time by reading the geological treatises of Cuvier? Borne away on the wings of his genius, have you hovered over the illimitable abyss of the past as if a magician's hand were holding you aloft? As one penetrates from seam to seam, from stratum to stratum and discovers, under the quarries of Montmartre or in the schists of the Urals, those animals whose fossilized remains belong to antediluvian civilizations, the mind is startled to catch a vista of the milliards of years and the millions of peoples which the feeble memory of man and an indestructible divine tradition have forgotten and whose ashes heaped on the surface of our globe, form the two feet of earth which furnish us with bread and flowers. Is not Cuvier the greatest poet of our century? Certainly Lord Byron has expressed in words some aspects of spiritual turmoil; but our immortal natural historian has reconstructed worlds from bleached bones.

Cuvier has suggested that animal species sometimes die out when they are no longer suited to survive in the world. The idea is troubling to people because it suggests that God does not have a hand in it, that He created animals and then sat back and let them die.

The late twentieth century has witnessed a remarkable growth in scientific interest in the subject of extinction. It is hardly a new subject—Baron Georges Cuvier had first demonstrated that species became extinct back in 1786, not long after the American Revolution. Thus the fact of extinction had been accepted by scientists for nearly three-quarters of a century before Darwin put forth his theory of evolution. And after Darwin, the many controversies that swirled around his theory did not often concern issues of extinction. On the contrary, extinction was generally considered as unremarkable as a car running out of gas. Extinction was simply proof of failure to adapt. How species adapted was intensely studied and fiercely debated. But the fact that some species failed was hardly given a second thought. What was there to say about it? However, beginning in the 1970s, two developments began to focus attention on extinction in a new way. The first was the recognition that human beings were now very numerous, and were altering the planet at a very rapid rate—eliminating traditional habitats, clearing the rain forest, polluting air and water, perhaps even changing global climate. In the process, many animal species were becoming extinct. Some scientists cried out in alarm; others were quietly uneasy. How fragile was the earth’s ecosystem? Was the human species engaged in behavior that would eventually lead to its own extinction?

especímenes de este género había clasificado la ciencia hasta entonces. Ni Cuvier, ni Lacepède, ni Dumeril ni Quatrefages hubieran admitido la existencia

the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

And if there were four extinct species, Cuvier declared, there must be others. The proposal was a daring one to make given the available evidence. On the basis of a few scattered bones, Cuvier had conceived of a whole new way of looking at life. Species died out. This was not an isolated but a widespread phenomenon. “All these facts, consistent among themselves, and not opposed by any report, seem to me to prove the existence of a world previous to ours,” Cuvier said. “But what was this primitive earth? And what revolution was able to wipe it out?

Sherlock Holmes closed his eyes and placed his elbows upon the arms of his chair, with his finger-tips together. “The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment. It is not so impossible, however, that a man should possess all knowledge which is likely to be useful to him in his work, and this I have endeavoured in my case to do.

The Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead. Cuvier has imparted flesh and motion and appetites to the defunct Megatherium, whilst the living ears of M.M. Michelet and Renan, of Mr. Carlyle and the Brothers Grimm, have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices. I myself, with the aid of the imagination, have worked a little in that line, have ventriloquised, have lent my voice to, and mixt my life with, those past voices and lives whose resuscitation in our own lives as warnings, as examples, as the life of the past persisting in us, is the business of every thinking man and woman.

In the beginning of the eighteenth century, De Maillet made the first serious attempt to apply the doctrine [of evolution] to the living world. In the latter part of it, Erasmus Darwin, Goethe, and Lamarck took up the work more vigorously and with better qualifications. The question of special creation, or evolution, lay at the bottom of the fierce disputes which broke out in the French Academy between Cuvier and St.-Hilaire; and, for a time, the supporters of biological evolution were silenced, if not answered, by the alliance of the greatest naturalist of the age with their ecclesiastical opponents. Catastrophism, a short-sighted teleology, and a still more short-sighted orthodoxy, joined forces to crush evolution.

Federico Cuvier y algunos de las metafísicos antiguos han comparado el instinto con la costumbre. Esta comparación da, creo yo, una noción exacta de la condición mental bajo la cual se realiza un acto instintivo, pero no necesariamente de su origen

Inspired by the controversy, in 1796 Cuvier wrote a landmark paper, Note on the Species of Living and Fossil Elephants, in which he put forward for the first time a formal theory of extinctions. His belief was that from time to time the Earth experienced global catastrophes in which groups of creatures were wiped out. For religious people, including Cuvier himself, the idea raised uncomfortable

The faint metallic smell of the falling snow surrounds her. calm yourself. Listen. Cars splash along streets, and snowmelt drums through runnels; she can hear snowflakes tick and patter through the trees. She can smell the cedars in the Jarin des Plantes a quarter mile away. Here the Metro hurdles beneath the sidewalk; that's the Quai Saint-Bernard. Here the sky opens up, and she hears the clacking of branches: that's the narrow stripe of gardens behind the Gallery of Paleontology. This, she realizes, must be the corner of the quay and rue Cuvier. ' Six blocks, forty buildings, ten tiny trees in a square. This street intersects this street intersects this street. One centimeter at a time. Her father stirs the keys in his packets. Ahead loom the tall, grand houses that flanked the gardens, reflecting sound. She says, "we go left

The ideal reasoner,” he remarked, “would, when he had once been shown a single fact in all its bearings, deduce from it not only all the chain of events which led up to it but also all the results which would follow from it. As Cuvier could correctly describe a whole animal by the contemplation of a single bone, so the observer who has thoroughly understood one link in a series of incidents should be able to accurately state all the other ones, both before and after. We have not yet grasped the results which the reason alone can attain to. Problems may be solved in the study which have baffled all those who have sought a solution by the aid of their senses. To carry the art, however, to its highest pitch, it is necessary that the reasoner should be able to utilise all the facts which have come to his knowledge; and this in itself implies, as you will readily see, a possession of all knowledge, which, even in these days of free education and encyclopaedias, is a somewhat rare accomplishment.

Frederick Cuvier and several of the older metaphysicians have compared instinct with habit. This comparison gives, I think, an accurate notion of the frame of mind under which an instinctive action is performed, but not necessarily of its origin. How unconsciously many habitual actions are performed, indeed not rarely in direct opposition to our conscious will! yet they may be modified by the will or reason. Habits easily become associated with other habits, with certain periods of time and states of the body. When once acquired, they often remain constant throughout life. Several other points of resemblance between instincts and habits could be pointed out. As in repeating a well-known song, so in instincts, one action follows another by a sort of rhythm; if a person be interrupted in a song, or in repeating anything by rote, he is generally forced to go back to recover the habitual train of thought: so P. Huber found it was with a caterpillar, which makes a very complicated hammock; for if he took a caterpillar which had completed its hammock up to, say, the sixth stage of construction, and put it into a hammock completed up only to the third stage, the caterpillar simply re-performed the fourth, fifth, and sixth stages of construction. If, however, a caterpillar were taken out of a hammock made up, for instance, to the third stage, and were put into one finished up to the sixth stage, so that much of its work was already done for it, far from deriving any benefit from this, it was much embarrassed, and, in order to complete its hammock, seemed forced to start from the third stage, where it had left off, and thus tried to complete the already finished work.

And one cold Tuesday in December, when Marie-Laure has been blind for over a year, her father walks her up rue Cuvier to the edge of the Jardin des Plantes. "Here, ma chérie, is the path we take every morning. Through the cedars up ahead is the Grand Gallery." "I know, Papa." He picks her up and spins her around three times. "Now," he says, "you're going to take us home." Her mouth drops open. "I want you to think of the model, Marie." "But I can't possibly!" "I'm one step behind you. I won't let anything happen. You have your cane. You know where you are." "I do not!" "You do." Exasperation. She cannot even say if the gardens are ahead or behind. "Calm yourself, Marie. One centimeter at a time." "I'm far, Papa. Six blocks, at least." "Six blocks is exactly right. Use logic. Which way should we go first?" The world pivots and rumbles. Crows shout, brakes hiss, someone to her left bangs something metal with what might be a hammer. She shuffles forward until the tip of her cane floats in space. The edge of a curb? A pond, a staircase, a cliff? She turns ninety degrees. Three steps forward. Now her cane finds the base of a wall. "Papa?" "I'm here." Six paces seven paces eight. A roar of noise - an exterminator just leaving a house, pump bellowing - overtakes them. Twelve paces farther on, the bell tied around the handle of a shop door rings, and two women came out, jostling her as they pass. Marie-Laure drops her cane; she begins to cry. Her father lifts her, holds her to his narrow chest. "It's so big," she whispers. "You can do this, Marie." She cannot.

Cuvier, in his 'Theory of the Earth,' first published in 1812, based his conclusions on his unparalleled correlative research in stratigraphy, comparative anatomy, and palaeontology. At that time he wrote: 'Every part of the earth, every hemisphere, every continent, exhibits the same phenomenon. [...] There has, therefore, been a succession of variations in the economy of organic nature [...] the various catastrophes which have disturbed the strata [...] have given rise to numerous shiftings of this (continental) basin. [...] It is of much importance to mark, that these repeated irruptions and retreats of the sea have neither been slow nor gradual; on the contrary, most of the catastrophes which occasioned them have been sudden; and this is specially easy to be proved, with regard to the last of these catastrophes. [...] I agree, therefore, [...] in thinking, that if anything in geology be established, it is, that the surface of our globe has undergone a great and sudden revolution, the date of which [...] cannot be [...] much earlier than five or six thousand years ago [...] (also), one preceding revolution at least had put (the continents) under water [...] perhaps two or three irruptions of the sea.

The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot. This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine. The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists. In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you. -Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.

The key point is that these patterns, while mostly stable, are not permanent: certain environmental experiences can add or subtract methyls and acetyls, changing those patterns. In effect this etches a memory of what the organism was doing or experiencing into its cells—a crucial first step for any Lamarck-like inheritance. Unfortunately, bad experiences can be etched into cells as easily as good experiences. Intense emotional pain can sometimes flood the mammal brain with neurochemicals that tack methyl groups where they shouldn’t be. Mice that are (however contradictory this sounds) bullied by other mice when they’re pups often have these funny methyl patterns in their brains. As do baby mice (both foster and biological) raised by neglectful mothers, mothers who refuse to lick and cuddle and nurse. These neglected mice fall apart in stressful situations as adults, and their meltdowns can’t be the result of poor genes, since biological and foster children end up equally histrionic. Instead the aberrant methyl patterns were imprinted early on, and as neurons kept dividing and the brain kept growing, these patterns perpetuated themselves. The events of September 11, 2001, might have scarred the brains of unborn humans in similar ways. Some pregnant women in Manhattan developed post-traumatic stress disorder, which can epigenetically activate and deactivate at least a dozen genes, including brain genes. These women, especially the ones affected during the third trimester, ended up having children who felt more anxiety and acute distress than other children when confronted with strange stimuli. Notice that these DNA changes aren’t genetic, because the A-C-G-T string remains the same throughout. But epigenetic changes are de facto mutations; genes might as well not function. And just like mutations, epigenetic changes live on in cells and their descendants. Indeed, each of us accumulates more and more unique epigenetic changes as we age. This explains why the personalities and even physiognomies of identical twins, despite identical DNA, grow more distinct each year. It also means that that detective-story trope of one twin committing a murder and both getting away with it—because DNA tests can’t tell them apart—might not hold up forever. Their epigenomes could condemn them. Of course, all this evidence proves only that body cells can record environmental cues and pass them on to other body cells, a limited form of inheritance. Normally when sperm and egg unite, embryos erase this epigenetic information—allowing you to become you, unencumbered by what your parents did. But other evidence suggests that some epigenetic changes, through mistakes or subterfuge, sometimes get smuggled along to new generations of pups, cubs, chicks, or children—close enough to bona fide Lamarckism to make Cuvier and Darwin grind their molars.

In Cuvier’s day, the most prominent proponent of transformisme was his senior colleague at the Museum of Natural History, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. According to Lamarck, there was a force—the “power of life”—that pushed organisms to become increasingly complex.

Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

Extinction finally emerged as a concept, probably not coincidentally, in revolutionary France. It did so largely thanks to one animal, the creature now called the American mastodon, or Mammut americanum, and one man, the naturalist Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier, known after a dead brother simply as Georges.

In the sixteenth century the Reformation introduced a new idea. This was the notion that knowledge is not simply the province of ecclesiastical institutions but that, especially when it comes to matters of conscience, each man should decide for himself. The “priesthood of the individual believer” was an immensely powerful notion because it rejected the papal hierarchy, and by implication all institutional hierarchy as well. Ultimately it was a charter of independent thought, carried out not by institutions but by individuals. The early Protestants didn’t know it, but they were introducing new theological concepts that would give new vitality to the emerging scientific culture of Europe. Here is a partial list of leading scientists who were Christian: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Brahe, Descartes, Boyle, Newton, Leibniz, Gassendi, Pascal, Mersenne, Cuvier, Harvey, Dalton, Faraday, Herschel, Joule, Lyell, Lavoisier, Priestley, Kelvin, Ohm, Ampere, Steno, Pasteur, Maxwell, Planck, Mendel. A good number of these scientists were clergymen. Gassendi and Mersenne were priests. So was Georges Lemaitre, the Belgian astronomer who first proposed the “big bang” theory for the origin of the universe. Mendel, whose discovery of the principles of heredity would provide vital support for the theory of evolution, spent his entire adult life as a monk in an Augustinian monastery. Where would modern science be without these men? Some were Protestant and some were Catholic, but all saw their scientific vocation in distinctively Christian terms.

Do you mind if I kiss you?" Morag asks, her Calvinist pallor giving way to high color, getting higher. "Why?" I ask. "I thought it might be fun," she says. "There's nobody about; our boys are away." Has she made a presumption of unbridled sensuality as some do when they contemplate my tropical aspect? One American boy, holding me too close, his body a monument to sweat, actually said, "Gee, I guess that means you can get into all those neat positions." Spoken with the logic of Cuvier contemplating the Venus Hottentot.

Il n’est pas douteux – précisons-le de suite – qu'il y ait eu des monuments écrits antérieurs aux traités dont le Yiking est le troisième. Ces monuments ont été écrits, ou dessinés, ou sculptés, sur le « Toit du Monde », berceau unique de l’humanité, à l’aide de signes que toute l’humanité comprenait, avant qu’elle se fût divisée par des migrations diverses, et qu’elle eût ainsi perdu la conscience de sa totalité. Ce qu’est cette écriture unique, on ne le saura sans doute jamais qu’à l’aide d’approximatives appréciations ; car un paléographe ne reconstruira pas une écriture au moyen d’un jambage, comme Cuvier reconstruisait un mammouth au moyen d’une jambe. Mais c’est de cette écriture unique que découlent, à des époques concordantes, et par des procédés de déformations parallèles, les hiérogrammes Chinois et les hiéroglyphes Chaldéens (ou suméro-acadiens). Il est possible toutefois de déterminer les influences, toutes physiques, qui présidèrent à ces déformations. Sur ce Pamir, qui fut notre commun berceau, une même langue, une même graphie, toutes deux perdues, régnaient. Un jour, soit qu’un cataclysme ait amené sur ces altitudes le froid qui y règne aujourd’hui, soit que, à force de se pencher sur le bord rugueux des plateaux, la race humaine ait pris le vertige des plaines inconnues, un jour vint où les hommes, par les fleuves qui prenaient naissance aux plateaux primitifs, descendirent aux niveaux inférieurs. Ainsi ceux du Sud, les futurs Rouges, par le Dzangbo et le Sindh, ainsi ceux de l’Ouest, les futurs Blancs, par le Syr et l’Amou, ainsi ceux de l’Est, les futurs Jaunes, par le Hoangho et le Yangtzé, tous, sans regarder en arrière, quittèrent la montagne ancestrale qui fut le nombril du monde. Parmi eux, les vieillards et les savants emportèrent la Sagesse et la Tradition.

The colonists began to set up academic societies and museums to burnish national identity and their versions of history and scientific prowess. South Carolina colonists established America’s first museum in Charleston in 1773 with “many specimens of natural history,” open only to its members. The colony was by then known for the most sensational fossils yet found in the New World. Enslaved Africans had unearthed mammoth teeth while digging in a swamp near Charleston in 1725, and immediately concurred that they were the grinders of some type of elephant. It would be more than eighty years before Georges Cuvier, Lamarck’s rival at the Paris museum, confirmed that “les nègres” had correctly identified a fossil elephant species before any European naturalist connected extinct mammoths to living elephants.

No es Cuvier el mayor poeta de nuestro siglo? —escribiría Balzac, entusiasmado, más adelante—. Nuestro inmortal naturalista ha reconstruido mundos partiendo de huesos blanqueados. Toma en las manos un fragmento de yeso y nos dice: “¡Mirad!”. Y, de pronto, la piedra se convierte en animales, lo muerto cobra vida y un mundo diferente se abre ante nuestros ojos.»

Later, as his [Cuvier's] list of extinct species grew, his position changed. There had, he decided, been multiple cataclysms. "Life on earth has often been disturbed by terrible events," he wrote. "Living organisms without number have been victims of these catastrophes.

Jean-Léopold-Nicolas-Frédéric Cuvier,

Paris skyscape. Paris was ‘less disposed than ever’ to be a centre for the sciences, Humboldt wrote to a friend in Geneva, as the funds for laboratories, research and teaching were slashed. The spirit of enquiry was stifled as scientists found themselves having to curry favours from the new king. The savants had become ‘pliant tools’ in the hands of politicians and princes, Humboldt told Charles Lyell in 1823, and even the great George Cuvier had sacrificed his genius as a naturalist for a new quest for ‘ribbons, crosses, titles and Court favours’. There was so much political wrangling in Paris that governmental positions seemed to change as quickly as in a game of musical chairs. Every man he met now, Humboldt said, was either a minister or an ex-minister. ‘They are scattered thick as the leaves in autumn,’ he told Lyell, ‘and before one set have time to rot away, they are covered by another and another.

She wanted to believe him so much, but fear held her in its grasp more firmly than ever before. And if she made the wrong decision, she would have to live with the result for the rest of her life. That could be a long time and she’d already made one wrong choice regarding marriage and love. What if she made another? She sat there remembering the way he’d been good to her children, the way he’d made love to her that first time, soothing her fears. She remembered how he’d finally begun to teach her the shipping business, the impromptu baseball game with Philip, the picnic in her office, the trip to his family home, and all the little things that made her laugh. From the very first he’d been kind to her, while lying repeatedly regarding the business. The business seemed to be his Achilles’ heel and he’d just given it to her.