History of Science: Buffon, the French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin

It was also on his estate where a well-known experiment was conducted: he heated solid iron balls of various sizes to a bright red color and observed how long they took to cool.

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

His conclusion was illogical, but it made sense: If the Earth could have started out as a mass of glowing red iron, as thinkers like Isaac Newton wondered, or perhaps the remains of a comet colliding with the sun, how long would it have taken? Until it cooled until it became habitable, to the point where the water did not evaporate?

“It wasn't entirely clear whether he had actually done this experiment, or whether it was a virtual experiment so people would understand the concept,” Roberts says. “He came to the conclusion that it had taken too long.”

“Writing in the 1750s, he said that climate change was a reality, and that humans were irreversibly altering the planet’s environment. He did not specifically predict global warming, because it was the pre-industrial era, but he warned that thinking more deeply about why We exploit resources and stability on a large scale without needing to.”

As if that were not enough, his observations led him to conclude the existence of DNA, which contains genetic information used in the development and functioning of all living organisms, and is responsible for genetic transmission.

“Buffon's concept was that if all life evolved from a single ancestor, then the basic components of life were the same, and that there were organic molecules that combined to form living things,” says Roberts.

“So he said, basically, there must be something in the cloning process that has changed over time, such that the assembly rules are different.”

“If that were the case, it stands to reason that there would be some kind of internal matrix, a ‘template’ or set of instructions that gives objects their particular shape,” he wondered.

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

“But Buffon initiated the idea,” says the author. “We cannot say with certainty that it inspired Mendel, although we have the book he read when he began the experiment and it contains a passage about Buffon that is underlined.”

All of these ideas, no matter how hidden, led to Buffon being officially censured by the institutions of the Catholic Church and by the Sorbonne, which was controlled by the Church at the time.

“He was threatened with formal charges being brought against him if he did not retract his statements. He wrote a statement in which he said: 'I cover myself with dust and ashes and disavow anything in my book that contradicts the teachings of the Church the next day.' Better than commenting.

Having done all this and more, why isn't Buffon better known?

“When Buffon died, she was one of the most famous people in the world. In Paris, there was a huge statue in her honor and about 20,000 people took to the streets at her funeral. Her writings were so popular that for the next century she remained the most popular French author. “

There are several reasons for this forgetfulness, including the anti-aristocratic fervor of the French Revolution.

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

He was his opposite, even in the way he handled his public life. Linnaeus developed admiration (he called his disciples “apostles”), while Buffon saw public praise as “an absurd and deceitful specter.”

However, what most favored Linnaeus was the extraordinary posthumous ideological competition, in which his worldview was more in line with the aspirations of the European powers.

“Linnaeus was the great classifier and taxonomist who wanted to classify and label everything. With the advent of global colonialism came the concept of erasing the original names of species, or any previous knowledge about life, and essentially conceptual colonization by giving a new 'science' of 'names,'” Which often immortalized those who had ‘discovered’, it appealed to the mentality of the time,” explains Roberts.

“This is in addition to the idea that nature itself can be tamed.”

Buffon agreed that the concept of species was necessary to ensure that we were talking about the same animal. But it was not necessary to put everything into neat hierarchies, because that would mean imposing an order on nature that does not exist, Roberts explains.

“He said: 'Let's not pretend that we are domesticating nature by putting this artificial structure on top of it.'

The dispute between the two was not limited to the nature that surrounds humans, but rather to themselves.

Linnaeus believed that humans should be classified according to European values. For this reason he is credited with creating racial categories for people.

It clearly put white Europeans at the top. Hey Homo europeanHe was, as he called him, blond, blue-eyed, “kind, sharp and creative.”

Hey Homo africanum It was dark and “slow, malicious, and careless” while he was Homo americanus He was red-skinned, “inflexible and cheerful”, and yellow in colour Asian human“Severe, arrogant, greedy.”

Buffon rejected this racial hierarchy.

“The differences are only external,” he wrote in 1758. “The changes in nature are superficial.”

“Furthermore, he believed that humans may have evolved into their current form not in Europe, which is the common belief, but somewhere near the equator, and he confirmed that this included North Africa and China. That's when he postulated that white people were humans.” “The original guy and everyone else was a bad copy,” Roberts says.

“Many nineteenth-century scholars were uncomfortable with Buffon’s approach.”

That's why he was relegated to the background.

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

As scholarship advanced, the importance of much of what the French aristocrat wrote was confirmed, and the place he deserved in history was increasingly emphasized.