Cuvier, Catastrophes, and New Species

[Brigit]

The full entry from an encyclopedia (Funk and Wagnalls) c. 1996 --

• Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), French naturalist, leader in founding the study of comparative anatomy and paleontology.
  
  Born in Montbeliard, then in the duchy of Wurttemberg, and educated at the Academy of Stuttgart, Cuvier became tutor to a noble French family. In 1795 he became an assistant in comparative anatomy at the Museum of Natural History in paris, and in 1796 he delivered one of the lectures at the opening of the National Institute. He was appointed professor of natural history at the College de France in 1799. He was also a councillor of the Imperial University and a councillor of state under Napoleon and later under Louis XVII. He was made a baron in 1831.
  
  He was the first to devise a systematic natural classification of the animal kingdom. His system, presented in a lecture in 1796, was published two years later. He expanded his classification in later work, dividing all animals into four great classes:
  • Articulata
    Radiata
    Vertebrata
    Molusca.
  He also studied the structure of the mollusks and the anatomy and osteology of fishes, mammals, and reptiles. He developed a theory that animals become extinct through natural catastrophe rather than through inability to adapt, and he proposed a doctrine of the immutability of species.
  
  This brought him into conflict with contemporary naturalists. His influence in France delayed acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution."

[allynh]

HA!

He developed a theory that animals become extinct through natural catastrophe rather than through inability to adapt, and he proposed a doctrine of the immutability of species.

I agree.

Plus: New species come into existence through symbiogenesis, not Darwinian incremental evolution.

(This will burn your brain the way Jaynes did.)

Discover Interview: Lynn Margulis Says She's Not Controversial, She's Right

It's the neo-Darwinists, population geneticists, AIDS researchers, and English-speaking biologists as a whole who have it all wrong.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sc ... shes-right

If you are heading down a different path with this thread, I'll hold off adding to the thought. HA!

[Brigit]

allynh says,

• "Plus: New species come into existence through symbiogenesis, not Darwinian incremental evolution.
  (This will burn your brain the way Jaynes did.)
  • Discover Interview: Lynn Margulis Says She's Not Controversial, She's Right
  If you are heading down a different path with this thread, I'll hold off adding to the thought. HA!"

No, she's talking about the discontinuities in the fossil record. So we can go ahead and put "symbiogenesis" into the list of possibilities for the reasons for the sudden appearance of new species.

Thank you for the article! It is definitely interesting.

[nick c]

Velikovsky wrote about Cuvier in "Precursors" in 1950.
https://www.varchive.org/ce/precursors.htm

Cuvier was a brilliant paleontologist, arguably the first. He studied stratigraphy, digging into the ground to understand the past.
He came to the conclusion that geological ages ended suddenly in global catastrophes, but was at a loss to explain the mechanism by which these stupendous changes in the Earth took place.

Cuvier was subsequently forgotten and catastrophism rejected; as Lyell's uniformitarianism became the new paradigm, which opened the door for the immense amounts of time needed for Darwinian slow evolution.