Buffon, the French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin

In 1859 Charles Darwin published his masterpiece “On the Origin of Species,” in which he described an ancient world in which life gradually changed from one form to another without the need for supernatural intervention..

And when the fury unleashed by his radical – for many, impious – ideas had not yet subsided, the naturalist began reading a book by someone called Georges-Louis Leclerc, a French aristocrat whose noble title was Count of Buffon.

He had died about 80 years earlier and, by the time the pioneer of the theory of evolution became interested in him, he was no longer as well known.

Darwin was greatly surprised.

“Entire pages (of your book) are ridiculously similar to mine”, he wrote to a friend. “It’s amazing how candid you can see your point of view in another man’s words.”

Such was the impact that in later editions of “The Origin of Species”, Darwin recognized Buffon as one of the “few” people who had understood before him that species change and evolve.

“What’s more, on Darwin’s 100th birthday, there were a series of tributes in which it was said that Darwin’s work cannot be underestimated, but that every ingredient necessary for the theory of evolution was already present in Buffon’s ideas “writer Jason Roberts told BBC Mundo.

That is an enormous achievement but one that at the time could not be presented openly: I had to camouflage itsaid Roberts, who researched his life and work for his book “Every living thing“(Every living being, in free translation),

“Several historians say that (Buffon) knew that it was not the right time to divulge that information because he was constantly having problems with the Church.

“It was Buffon who first said that the Earth was perhaps billions of years old, and the time scale was so large that life could have evolved from a single ancestor.”

Saying something like that exposed you to being branded a heretic, for suggesting that the Earth was older than what the Bible said.

“He knew it was radical, so as soon as he wrote it, he added a paragraph saying, ‘But of course this is ridiculous speculation, because the Book of Genesis tells us otherwise.'”

It was not the only time that he used this strategy of exposing his ideas and then attenuating them in his works, particularly in his masterful “Historia natural, general y particular” (1749-88).

These are ideas that surprise today as much as Darwin did more than a century and a half ago, since the French scientist intuited much more than the theory of evolution..

Although Buffon is remembered as an aristocrat, he did not receive his noble title until he was 65 years old and had a firm place in the French intelligentsia, as a brilliant mathematician, writer and scholar.

His origins, in fact, were much more humble: he was the son of a tax collector in rural Burgundy, and the expectation was that he would also become a minor public official.

“But when his great-uncle died, he left him a fortune. Suddenly, at age 11, his world changed, and he was raised to be a conceited aristocrat, although ended up having much more interest in the aristocracy of the mind, of ideas“.

He dedicated much of his fortune to creating what Roberts describes as “the first ecological reserve.”

He bought 40 hectares of land, planted trees and set out to observe not only how they grew but also the species that made the place their home.

“He was perhaps the first person to study nature in its context, rather than isolated dead specimens, and, knowing that everything would take time to mature, when he was 27, he imposed a rigorous physical regime on himself to stay in the best possible shape. for as long as possible.”

Apparently, it had an effect because “he lived to be more than 80 years old, and people said that until he died he looked as if he were 20 years younger.”

His farm was also where a well-known experiment took place: he heated solid iron balls of various sizes red hot and observed how long it took them to cool down.

With the data he obtained, he extracted an equation for the relationship between cooling time and volume, and used it to calculate the age of the Earth.

Your result It was misguided, but logic did not: If, as thinkers like Isaac Newton had postulated, the Earth could have started out as a red-hot hunk of iron, perhaps a remnant of a comet’s collision with the Sun, how long would it have taken to cool until it could be inhabited? , at the point where the water will not evaporate?

“It was never entirely clear if he actually did that experiment, or if it was a thought experiment to get people to understand the concept.

“He came to the conclusion that it was a very long time.

“He did his best to guide readers, talking about how there were various periods in which different things were happening, although he made sure not to give specific numbers, knowing that it was controversial.

“But he did declare that the last era, that of now, is that of man.

“AND, writing in the 1750s, he said that climate change was a realitythat humans were indelibly changing the planet’s environment.

“It didn’t specifically predict global warming, because it was a pre-industrial era, but it warned us to think more deeply about why we were exploiting resources and settling on a large scale when we didn’t need to.”

As if that were not enough, his observations led him to intuit the existence of DNAthe nucleic acid that contains the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all living organisms and is responsible for hereditary transmission.

“Buffon’s concept was that if all life had evolved from a single ancestor, that meant that the basic components of life were the same, that there were organic molecules that were assembled to create organisms.

“So he said, basically, ‘there has to be something in the playback process that changed over time, so the assembly rules were different.’

“If that was the case, he postulated, then it made sense that there was some kind of internal matrix, a ‘mold’ or a set of instructions that gave organisms their particular shape“.

As with Darwin, who undoubtedly deserves credit for the theory of evolution, Gregor Mendel deserves credit for resolving aspects of the rules of genetics in plant inheritance.

“But Buffon postulated the idea. And we can’t say with certainty that he inspired Mendel, although we have the book that Mendel read when he started experimenting and it contains a passage about Buffon that is underlined.”

All of these ideas, no matter how much he camouflaged them, led to Buffon being officially censured by institutions of the Catholic Church and by the Sorbonne University, which at that time was controlled by the church.

“They threatened to file formal charges against him. if he did not renounce his statements.

“He wrote a statement saying, ‘I cover myself in dust and ashes and disown anything in my book that is against the teachings of the church.’ He took that letter and put it in the next edition of his work, and he didn’t. He changed not a word.

“And said: ‘It is better to be modest than to be hanged’“.

Having done all that and more, why isn’t Buffon better known?

“It was,” Roberts assured.

“When Buffon died, he was one of the most famous people in the world. In Paris there was a huge statue in his honor and some 20,000 people took to the streets at his funeral.

“His writings were so popular that for the next century he remained the most popular French author.”

The reasons for the oblivion are several, among them the anti-aristocratic fervor of the French Revolution.

But, above all, the rivalry with another scientific pioneer who was his contemporary and also dedicated himself to the task of exploring life: the Swede Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy.

He was his polar opposite even in the way he approached his public life. Linnaeus cultivated admiration (he called his pupils “apostles”), while for Buffon public praise was “a vain and deceitful phantom.”

However, what Linnaeus benefited most from was an unusual ideological competition. posthumous in which his vision of the world turned out to be more in line with the aspirations of the European powers.

“Linnaeus was the great classifier and taxonomist who wanted to categorize and label everything.

“With the rise of global colonialism, the concept of erasing indigenous names for species, or any prior knowledge about life, and essentially conceptually colonize By granting new ‘scientific names’, which often immortalized the ‘discoverer’, he appealed to the mentality of the era.

“That, and the idea that nature itself could be domesticated.”

Buffon agreed that the species concept was necessary to ensure that we were talking about the same animal. But it was not necessary to put everything in orderly hierarchies, because that It involved imposing an order on nature that did not exist.explains Roberts.

“He said, ‘Let’s not pretend we’re taming nature by putting this artificial structure on top of it.'”

The disagreement between the two was not limited to the nature that surrounded humans, but to themselves.

Linnaeus considered that humans should be classified according to European values. That is why he is credited with establishing racial categories for people.

It put white Europeans firmly on top. He Homo europaeusas he called him, was blond, blue-eyed, “gentle, sharp and inventive.”

He Homo africanus was dark and “slow, malicious and negligent” while the Homo americanus was red-skinned and “inflexible and cheerful”, and the yellow Homo asiaticus“severe, haughty, greedy.”

Buffon rejected this racial hierarchy.

“The differences are merely external,” he wrote in 1758. “The alterations of nature are superficial.”

“On top of that, he thought that humans probably evolved to their current form not in Europe, which was the common belief, but somewhere in a band around the equator, and he made sure that band included North Africa and China.

“That was when it was assumed that white people were the original man and everyone else was a bad copy.

“Many scientists in the 19th century were greatly bothered by Buffon’s approach.“.

That’s why it was relegated to the background.

But, little by little, since the 20th century, Buffon’s vision and the importance of his ideas began to be rediscovered.

With the advancement of science, it has been confirmed how accurate much of what the French aristocrat wrote was, and his place in history is increasingly reaffirmed.

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