Comte de Buffon

Died: April 16, 1788; Paris, France
Fields of study: Anthropology, biology, botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, paleontology, zoology
Born to a noble family in Dijon, Buffon was admitted to the French Academy of Sciences in 1734 and the Académie Française in 1753. In 1739 he was appointed director (Intendant) of the Jardin du Roi, the royal botanical garden. Between 1749 and his death, he published (with associates) thirty-six volumes of the Histoire Naturelle (44 vols., 1739-1804; A Natural History, General and Particular, 10 vols., 1807) which took in the formation of the earth, geology, paleontology, zoology, and botany. The last eight volumes were posthumous. A master of style, his books were among the most popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Buffon believed that the study of Earth was a necessary prerequisite to botany and zoology, and wrote two important texts on geology and paleontology. The first, Théorie de la terre, was published in 1749, the other, Époques de la nature, in 1778. From experiments on the cooling of globes, he estimated the age of the earth to be 85,000 years, significantly at variance with his contemporaries’ estimation of an origin around 4000-6000 b.c.e. Buffon’s cosmogony replaced the intervention of God by a cause whose effects are in accord with the laws of mathematics. Buffon postulated that new varieties of plants and animals (including humans) were produced in nature by external geographical influences. Such influences could also cause degeneration. He was against classifying nature, as “. . . everything that can be, is.” He gave “species” a purely biological definition: animals that by means of copulation perpetuate themselves and preserve their similarity.Hethought families were artificial creations made by man. He therefore thought Linnaeus’ classification of plants based on sexual characters was too rigid. He arranged animals in order of their utility to humans (later he rearranged them according to distinctive characteristics) and believed that some forms might have degenerated from others over time—thus, the ass might be a degenerate form of the horse. Buffon thus alluded to a form of “evolution” where physical characteristics produced by external influences could be passed down the generations. Buffon tried to separate science from religious and metaphysical ideas, and rejected teleological reasoning and the idea of God’s direct intervention in nature. His theories went against the accepted theological belief of immutability of species and he was reprimanded by the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris for this. Buffon apologized but did not change his views. Buffon was made a count in 1773 by Louis XV. He was greatly respected by his contemporaries and was made a member of almost every learned society in Europe.