5 - Before Darwin I

Summary

Introduction

In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the unquestioned center of work in the life sciences was the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. One of Darwin's early teachers, Robert Grant, spent time there, as did Darwin's friend, and later enemy, Richard Owen. It is an institution worth studying in itself, but the most notorious episode associated with it, on which we will focus here, was the debate in 1830 between two of its professors, Georges Cuvier, by then the unquestioned doyen of French science, and his long-time colleague Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire. Their disagreement had been building up for more than a decade, but it came to a head in the spring of 1830. We may put the nub of their quarrel very briefly, before providing a sketch of its historical background, and then returning to analyze their contrasting positions in a little more detail.

Geoffroy was a man of one idea. As early as 1796, at the age of twenty-three, he had written, in an essay on a species of lemur (the “maki” or “macaco”): “It seems that nature has confined itself within certain limits, and has formed all living beings only on one unique plan” (Geoffroy 1796 in Le Guyader 1998, p. 35). Later, Geoffroy was to prefer the expression “unity of composition,” but the thought of looking for widespread unities remained.