Chapter Twenty-four: Transformism and Catastrophism, Every Living Thing

Twenty-four

Transformism and Catastrophism

Two years and two months later, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire made his own return from Egypt. It was January of 1802, and the now twenty-nine-year-old Geoffroy was among the last of the 151 enlisted savants trickling back from the remnants of the expedition. In the wake of their leader’s abandonment he’d made the best of the situation, conducting fieldwork in between troop movements and sending a steady stream of specimens back to the Jardin. It had been a heady, fascinating time, particularly when the troops melted away and he was left to his own devices, possibly forgotten but in a landscape deeply touched by time.

He found a hero’s welcome awaiting him in Paris, and a rapidly transforming city. Napoleon had spun his unsuccessful military foray into a triumph of national pride, by presenting Egyptian artifacts as cultural coups. Egyptian statuary and votive objects were prominently on display at the Louvre (soon to be renamed the Musée Napoleon), and a tide of Egyptomania had swept fashionable France. Geoffroy walked through streets populated with women wearing turbans, past townhouses adorned with sphinxes and scarabs in a new architectural style called retour d’Egypte (return from Egypt). Other former members of the expedition were already hard at work adapting their sketches and field reports, which First Counsel Napoleon was eager to publish in lavish form, at public expense.

Within the Jardin gates, much had happened in Geoffroy’s absence. He resumed his old position to effusive praise, but behind the scenes the balance of power was beginning to shift. In a series of deft moves, his friend Georges Cuvier had taken advantage of several factors—the lassitude of senior Jardinistes, the absence of 151 prominent members of the savantry community, and the general tide of revolutionary reform—to meld politics and natural history into a career-making trajectory. He’d finessed his way into temporarily occupying the Museum’s chair of comparative anatomy, a position he would soon occupy permanently. He’d also secured a professorship at the Collège de France, a new institute reconstituted from the pre-revolutionary Collège Impérial. Combined, these roles gave him a solid base from which to consolidate influence and launch himself as a public figure.

Cuvier was, in fact, becoming famous, lecturing to crowded audiences that often seemed more interested in the speaker than the subject at hand. “He was then at his maturity, and might pass for a handsome man,” one contemporary wrote. “His shock of red hair was now cut and trimmed in Parisian style. His dress was that of the fashion of the day, not without a little affectation.” Geoffroy took in all of this with equanimity. Cuvier was still his friend. Geoffroy had never been much for grandstanding in the lecture hall anyway; his ambitions ran toward expanding his zoo and analyzing his trove of Egyptian specimens.

But the most impressive achievements in the Jardin belonged to Lamarck. Now fifty-eight years old, the professor of insects, worms, and microscopic animals had burst into the most productive phase of his career. Resigned to working within the Linnean hierarchy, he proceeded to expand it. Linnaeus “carried such great weight among naturalists that no one dared to change this monstrous class of worms,” he wrote, while ushering Vermes into a new class for which he invented the term invertebrates. He moved crustaceans out of the order Insectae—a lobster, he concluded, was not a bug. Nor were spiders and other arachnids, which he ushered into an order of their own. Over his lifetime he would become second only to Linnaeus in the giving of names, assigning classifications to at least 1,700 species.

Another notable innovation had arisen from Lamarck’s forced move from botany to zoology. He’d come to realize that “natural history,” while acceptable as a category of savantry, was too vague a term for the discipline now taking on the recognizable contours of a science. Under natural history, botany and zoology had wandered along separate tracks. Having negotiated those tracks, Lamarck had coined a new term for a single science that encompassed both. He called it biology, the unified study of living things.

Under Linnean dominance, natural history focused on differences. Lamarck’s biology focused on commonalities, even across the so-called kingdoms of animal and vegetable. Linnean natural history had a mystery at its core: The mechanisms and principles by which it operated were simply aspects of divine intent. Lamarck’s biology was a discipline of dismantling, examining, and questioning.

Lamarck was not done surprising his young colleague Geoffroy. He’d parted ways with Buffon because he could not bring himself to believe his patron’s theories on the fluidity of life, clinging instead to the fixity of species. But faced with the complexities of cataloguing nine-tenths of all animal life, he’d undergone a radical change in thinking. Such profusion was not the result of a single act but a process. Species were not fixed.

This had opened up new vistas in his work, in which he’d begun to expand upon the Buffonian concept of exogenesis. In the spring of 1800, during a series of public lectures on his freshly coined invertebrates, he began to follow through on the implications of his change of perspective. Buffon’s musings on species change were general and conceptual, but Lamarck produced a fleshed-out theory centered on the environment, which he characterized as “the conditions of life.” As these conditions changed, he envisioned species changing with them, in a two-part process.

The first process he called “the law of use and disuse.” If an organism relied on specific aspects of its physiology, those aspects would be strengthened across the span of subsequent generations. If other aspects were no longer used, physiologies would conserve metabolic resources by rendering them vestigial, or by abandoning them entirely. Lamarck cited the genus Spalax, the blind mole rat, so adapted to life underground that while it still had eyes they no longer functioned: They were minuscule, and covered entirely by a layer of skin.

The second process was “the law of inherited characteristics.” Once acquired, physical characteristics could be passed on to new generations—to which the first law would still apply, producing further changes. Thus life moved both laterally, along l’influence des circonstances, or the adaptive force, and vertically, via le pouvoir de la vie, the complexifying force.

Lamarck believed that this interplay of adaptation and sophistication, of use and disuse, accounted for species change. Upon Geoffroy’s return, he was preparing for publication Research on the Organization of Living Bodies, the book that would debut his theory of what he called transformisme, or transformism.

Cuvier, however, had grand theories of his own. As acting chair of comparative anatomy, he had free rein over the increasing number of fossil specimens acquired by the museum. Their preponderance had convinced him that, in one regard at least, Buffon had been right: Extinction was a fact. As savants pieced together more and more fossil species, Cuvier came to the conclusion that across the geological scale of time, numerous lifeforms had died out, and new ones had emerged to take their place.

This did not, however, mean he believed in species change. Far from it—by his reckoning, every single species was the result of a unique act of creation. Citing what he called the “correlation of parts,” Cuvier marveled at the intricacies of both fossil and living anatomies: how elegantly each bone coordinated with the next, how effectively they interrelated to constitute a functioning whole. Everything fit together as tightly and efficiently as the clockworks of a master craftsman, revealing an intelligent design so admirably suited for its environment that it was impossible to imagine incremental change.

How could one species possibly transform into another? Any modification to the design would upset the correlation of parts, causing it to no longer function. Cuvier thought Buffon’s exogenesis, and even more so Lamarck’s newer, more refined theory of transformism, were as ridiculous as saying a grandfather clock could, through the gradual replacement of parts, become a pocket watch while continuing to keep time.

How then, to account for the emergence of new life in the wake of extinction? Championing a doctrine that would come to be known as catastrophism, he argued that the Earth had undergone several periods of cataclysmic change, one of which had been the Great Flood referenced in the Bible. Some species survived these catastrophes, enduring unchanged into the present day. Others perished, and remained extinct. A third group of new species were simply divinely called into existence, in the wake of each catastrophe. The actions described in the book of Genesis had indeed taken place; it’s just that there had also been repeat performances.

Lamarck’s transformism and Cuvier’s catastrophism arose at roughly the same time, and in diametric opposition to each other. Geoffroy’s return provided the fuel for their conflict to erupt into the public eye.

In Egypt, Geoffroy had discovered that human mummies were vastly outnumbered by mummified animals—cats, crocodiles, dogs, jackals, snakes, and especially birds. One site, the catacombs of Tuna el-Gebel, held an estimated four million mummified birds, which curiously all seemed to be of the same species. Arriving with numerous examples from the Tuna el-Gebel trove, Geoffroy inadvertently laid the groundwork for what became known as the Sacred Ibis Debates.

The debates began in 1802, when Cuvier, Lamarck, and Lacépède jointly presented the mummies to the Académie des Sciences. After carefully unwrapping and examining several specimens, all three agreed that they were approximately three thousand years old, and that, in the words of Lacépède, “these animals are perfectly similar to those of today.” Lacépède did not get further into the matter, choosing instead to return to his work on Histoire Naturelle. But Lamarck and Cuvier drew very different conclusions, framing a public contention that continued for years.

Upon measuring the skeleton, Cuvier discovered that the mysterious bird species was not, as assumed at the time, the yellow-billed stork (Tantalus ibis)—in fact, it was not a stork at all, having a curved beak instead of a straight one. Digging around in the archives of the Jardin, he found specimens of an as-yet-unclassified bird that seemed a far better match. He named this species Numenius ibis, or sacred ibis (it would later be reclassified Threskiornis aethiopicus).

Comparing the mummified bones with the ones pulled from the shelf, Cuvier concluded that “we certainly do not observe more differences between these creatures and those which we see today than between human mummies and today’s human skeletons.” This he offered as definitive proof that Buffon and Lamarck were wrong. The categories of species were firmly fixed after all.

It was a glaring instance of circular logic. He had reconstructed an old skeleton, sought out a newer one that resembled it, then declared—on the basis of that resemblance—that they were one and the same species. And since his newly christened Numenius ibis hadn’t changed in three thousand years, Cuvier concluded that therefore it would never do so in the future.

In his own address to the Académie, Lamarck replied that he’d have been surprised if the sacred ibis had changed. For one, the process of transformism could very well play out over far longer timeframes, but more important, the climate and conditions of Egypt had not changed appreciably since the specimens were mummified. Adaptation was the engine of transformism: It stood to reason that once a species adapted to an environment, change would be halted until the environment itself changed.

To people still struggling with the idea that the Earth was more than six thousand years old, the idea that three millennia were an eyeblink was difficult to grasp. A general consensus arose that Cuvier had won the debate, and decisively. As the late-nineteenth-century science historian William Locy concluded of Cuvier: “It is undeniable that his position of hostility in reference to the speculation of Lamarck retarded the progress of science for nearly half a century.”

The debates sent Lamarck’s reputation into eclipse, while firmly establishing his opponent as one of the foremost figures in French science (a term increasingly replacing savantry). Capitalizing on his celebrity and heightened social status—he would eventually be ennobled as Baron Cuvier—the man praised for demolishing the theory of species change now tackled another concept he considered erroneous: the idea that all human beings were created equal.

The spurious pseudoscience surrounding the codification of humans into distinct categories began with Linnaeus, but it had taken on momentum with the 1795 publication of the third edition of De Generis Humani Varietate Nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind), by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In previous editions, Blumenbach had only slightly tweaked the categories of Systema Naturae, writing, “Linnaeus allotted four classes of inhabitants to the four quarters of the globe respectively…. I have followed Linnaeus in the number, but I have defined my varieties by other boundaries.”

In his third edition, Blumenbach felt emboldened to make more fundamental changes. He replaced Linnean terminology (Americanus rubescens, etc.) with coinages of his own, deciding that “five principal varieties of mankind may be reckoned…Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American and Malay.” While he himself labeled these only “principal varieties,” he cited others using the term race to the same purpose. Race it would be.

Blumenbach’s categories did not neatly overlap those of Linnaeus. There were no Asians, only Mongolians. All Africans, including Egyptians, were Ethiopians (the region now known as Ethiopia was then more commonly referred to as Abyssinia). The Malay category included Australian aborigines and Polynesians. The Caucasians included Arabs, Jews, Armenians, Hindus, Persians, and nearly all Europeans (he excluded Lapps and Finns). In other words, each category included a wide variety of skin colors, which was exactly Blumenbach’s aim. He was trying to remove Linnaeus’s color-coding while at the same time maintaining the convenience of broad categories.

But Caucasian was more than a replacement for Linnaeus’s Europeanus albus. While Linnaeus’s categories were rife with prejudices, they were not prioritized; none was explicitly placed above the others. Blumenbach, however, did not hesitate to declare racial superiority. He was a collector of skulls, and in his opinion the prettiest specimen (in terms of pleasing proportions) in his collection was that of a female from the Caucasus, a mountain range between the Black and Caspian seas. Guided purely by personal aesthetics, Blumenbach wrote, “I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian,” explaining, “I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus…because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men…. In that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones of mankind.”

Autochthones meant original forms. In examining his skull collection, Blumenbach imagined a line of descent from the Garden of Eden. Guided solely by personal aesthetics (of bones at that), he concluded that Adam and Eve must have been Caucasians. As the naturalist Robert Gordon Latham wrote in 1850, “Never has a single head done more harm to science than was done in the way of posthumous mischief by the head of this well-shaped female from Georgia.” By assigning labels and declaring an “original” form of humanity, Blumenbach effectively combusted modern racism into existence.

Cuvier stood ready to amplify Blumenbach’s aesthetic musings into outright assertions of racial supremacy. To him, Africans were “the most degraded of human races, whose form approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at regular government.” Meanwhile, “the Caucasian [race], to which we belong, is distinguished by the beauty of the oval which forms the head, and it is this one which has given rise to the most civilized nation—to those which have generally held the rest in subjection.”

The phrase to which we belong, assuming an exclusively Caucasian readership, was an especially fatuous touch. For all his prejudices, Cuvier at least gingerly conceded to Buffon’s definition of a species. “Since the union of any of its members produces individuals capable of propagation,” he wrote, “the human species would appear to be single.”

Other naturalists were not so certain. Charles White, the author of the 1799 work Account of the Regular Gradations in Man, took Buffon to task, arguing that surely the Creator could bestow separate species with the ability to interbreed. “There are but two ways of accounting for this great diversity in the human frame and condition,” White concluded. “To suppose that the diversity, great as it is, might be produced from one pair, by the slow operation of natural causes…. Or to suppose that different species were originally created with those distinctive marks which they still retain.”

White firmly believed in the latter. He was an adherent of polygenism, the doctrine that humans looked different because they were fundamentally different—God had created them at different times, and for different reasons. Reproduction was immaterial: Races were not generalized groupings but distinctly separate species.

Polygenism’s roots were ancient. Paracelsus, Walter Raleigh, and Giordano Bruno all postulated various scenarios that took separate creations as a given. But polygenism as pseudoscience dates back to 1655, when a French theologist named Isaac de la Peyrere published Men Before Adam, a tract in which he argued that the truth of humanity lay in chapter five, verse thirteen of the New Testament’s Epistle to the Romans: Sin is not charged against anyone’s account where there is no law. To de la Peyrere, the story of Adam and Eve accounted for the origins of the Jewish people, not for humanity as a whole. Since Adam sinned, it followed that there was law in the Garden of Eden, and if there was law, there must have been what he termed “pre-Adamites,” preceding populations that created such laws.

The theology was contortive, and controversial. Men Before Adam was burned in Paris, and de la Peyrere briefly imprisoned. But the ideas espoused gained a broad and persistent following, particularly among those who added their own interpretation. The author’s original intent had merely been to resolve some of the perplexing inconsistencies in the Bible—where, for instance, did Cain’s wife come from?—but polygenism dovetailed neatly with a rising interest in justifying conquest, colonial exploitation, and slavery. Under pre-Adamite theory, those subjugated were divinely ordained to be separate, and therefore unequal. “Our wise men have said that man is the image of God,” wrote Voltaire, one of the more prominent polygenesists. “Here is a pleasant image of the Eternal Being: a flat black nose with no intelligence!” Polygenesists held particular scorn for Buffon, whose theory of divergence from common origin struck them as preposterous. “Doth M. Buffon think it sufficient to say dryly, that such varieties may possibly be the effect of climate, or other accidental causes?” wrote the Scottish Lord Kames in 1774. “We are put off with mere suppositions and possibilities.”

Lamarck had survived the French Revolution by maintaining a low profile, and in the aftermath of the Sacred Ibis Debates he continued to do so. He was reluctant to call attention to his domestic arrangements in Buffon’s former residence, which were unconventional even by Parisian standards. For fifteen years he’d lived with Rosalie Delaporte, his mistress and the mother of his six children, consenting to marry her only on her deathbed in 1792. He remarried two or three more times (the record is unclear), had two more children, and struggled to maintain his large family on what remained a minuscule stipend. Lamarck’s last attempt to maintain a public profile came in 1809, when he requested an appointment to present a copy of his masterwork Philosophie Zoologique to then-emperor Napoleon. He was rejected, as Napoleon mistakenly thought it was a book of meteorology, “which Napoleon considered unworthy of a member of his Académie des Sciences,” one chronicle records. “The elderly zoologist was reduced to tears.” By 1810 he had begun to retreat even further from society, this time to hide a secret: He was slowly but inexorably losing his eyesight. Over the next eight years, he would go completely blind. Relying on his daughters to help him read and write, he became a virtual hermit in the Jardin des Plantes.

Still, with Geoffroy’s encouragement, he continued to develop his thoughts on transformism. In his final book, Analytic System of Positive Knowledge About Man, published in 1820, he argued that diversity arose from different points of digression along a single path. “Reptiles…build a branching sequence, with one branch leading from turtles to platypuses to the diverse group of birds, which the other seems to direct itself, via lizards, towards the mammals,” he wrote. “The birds then…build a richly variable branching series, with one branch ending in birds of prey.”

It was a description of life’s abundance as a reflection of unity, a series of branches on a common tree. It also bore striking parallels to Buffon’s decades-earlier observation of Nature: “We should not be wrong in supposing that she knew how to draw through time all other organized forms from one primordial type.”

The other protégés of Buffon began to fade away. In the post-revolutionary era, Count Lacépède had published two more volumes of Histoire Naturelle, one on cetaceans and one on fishes, in which he remained faithful to Buffon’s complexism. “Why not proclaim an important truth? The species is like the genus, the order, and the class: It is basically an abstraction of the mind, a collective idea,” he wrote, echoing his predecessor’s cautions. Like Buffon he acknowledged the practicality of working in categories, calling them “necessary for apprehending, comparing, knowing, instructing” but warning that human convenience was not the same as physical reality. “Nature has only created beings that resemble each other and beings that differ,” Lacépède wrote in 1804. All further demarcations were constructs of imagination, entities of reason.

He left off there. In the era of néolinnéisme, when even the calendar bore Linnaeus’s stamp, it seemed pointless to continue to caution against species, genus, order, and class. Quietly, with little public notice, the writing of Histoire Naturelle came to an end. Lacépède drifted off to launch a brilliant second career in politics, becoming president of the French senate and a minister of state under Napoleon. But he remained loyal to the mentor who had created and bequeathed to him “a general and immense natural work.” He died in 1825, at the age of sixty-eight. “I shall see Buffon again” were his last words.

Michel Adanson, the former Jardiniste who’d sought to create a natural system all on his own, died in abject poverty in 1806, his small pension from the Académie des Sciences having disappeared when the Académie itself disappeared during the revolution. His massive work, which he stubbornly refused to amend during his lifetime, went unfinished and unpublished. To note his passing, Cuvier delivered a bitingly dismissive eulogy. “Monsieur Adanson devoted himself to his great work,” he said. “Henceforth his ideas were no longer fed or improved by those of any other. His genius now wrought upon its own foundations only, and these foundations underwent no further renovation.”

But Adanson’s work would not go entirely in vain. After nearly two decades of patient toil, Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu had at last published the first volume of his Genera Plantarum, a functional natural method for the classification of plants. While it retained Linnaeus’s binomial nomenclature, Genera Plantarum applied them differently. Unlike the Linnean sexual system, which picked only one characteristic (the arrangement of stamens and pistils), Jussieu’s system took multiple characteristics into account. But it prioritized some over others, layering them in three categories: uniform characteristics, almost uniform characteristics, and semi-uniform characteristics.

Genera Plantarum arranged thousands of flowers into fifteen classes, which in turn encompassed one hundred “family” sub-groupings. Of the hundred families, thirty-eight were directly borrowed from Adanson’s unfinished taxonomy, a debt Jussieu freely acknowledged.

Despite his reputation as a zealous guardian of his own work, Adanson had appreciated the tribute. He’d made a single request for his funeral, asking that his grave be adorned with a wreath of thirty-eight flowers. Each represented one of his contributions to the new Jussieu system.

Genera Plantarum, however, seemed destined to make almost no mark in botanical savantry. It had been published on the unfortunate date of August 4, 1789, coincidentally the day of a pivotal event. On that date the National Assembly abolished France’s feudal system, stripping away the rights of nobility and setting the revolution on its radical, reactionary path. A new book by a little-known Jardiniste attracted little notice. Jussieu abandoned botany, taking part in Paris’s municipal government and rising to the directorship of the city’s hospitals. He would eventually return to the Jardin and work on a new edition of Genera Plantarum, but failed to find enough interest to justify publication. Only the introduction to a second edition would see print, and that only after his death in 1836.

Adanson’s was not the last grave Cuvier would dance upon. When Lamarck died in 1829 at the age of eighty-five, Cuvier wrote a eulogy but did not deliver it in person—diplomatically so, as it contained not a scintilla of praise. In Lamarck, he concluded, “too great indulgence of a lively imagination had led to results of a more questionable kind.” He went on to attack Lamarck’s “attachments to systems so little in accordance with the ideas which prevailed in science.” Such attachments “were not calculated to recommend him to those who had the power of dispensing favours,” Cuvier concluded, all but pointing at himself.

Geoffroy was among the mourners at the sparsely attended funeral, a ceremony made all the more dreary by the knowledge that Lamarck had died without the funds to purchase even a proper burial—the Montparnasse cemetery grave he was being lowered into was a leased one, good for only five years’ occupancy. “Blind, poor, forgotten, he remained alone with a glory of whose extent he himself was conscious,” Geoffroy remembered of his mentor and friend, “but which only the coming ages will sanction, when shall be revealed more clearly the laws of organization.”

The five-year lease on Lamarck’s grave ended in 1835. His remains were exhumed and placed in a common pit. Its location has long been forgotten.

By then Cuvier himself was dead, one of nineteen thousand victims of the 1832 cholera epidemic that swept through Paris. But his ambitious graspings at fame and political favor had not gone unrewarded. He died a baron, and when the Eiffel Tower rose in 1887 it bore his name in gilded letters, a part of a gallery of “great French men of Science.” To create a new position for his son Frederick Cuvier, the museum directors stripped Geoffroy of his post as head of the Jardin’s zoo, a job he’d held since he created it in 1793. The humiliated Geoffroy retreated from the public eye; he died in 1844.

Geoffroy’s son Isidore, who followed him into natural history, shared his father’s appreciation for the Jardin’s pre-revolutionary intendant. “Buffon is to the doctrine of the mutability of species what Linnaeus is to that of its fixity,” Isidore wrote. “It is only since the appearance of Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle, and in consequence thereof, that the mutability of species has taken rank among scientific questions.”

Lamarck’s theory of transformism, so vigorously attacked within France, evinced little contemporary attention elsewhere. One of its few appraisals had appeared in 1826, in an anonymous review published in a short-lived journal in Edinburgh, Scotland. The review was notable on two counts. First, the anonymous reviewer, seeking an English substitute for transformisme, decided on the term evolution—a coinage that gave the word its modern meaning. Second, the journal’s publisher (and likely the anonymous reviewer) was Robert Jameson, a professor of natural history at the University of Edinburgh. One of his students at the time was an eighteen-year-old named Charles Darwin.