Shortly after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, The origin of species, in 1859 he began reading an unknown 100-year-old work by a wealthy French aristocrat.
Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages [of his book] is laughable like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how honest it makes one to see your view in another man’s words.”
In later editions of The origin of speciesDarwin recognized Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.
Now a new book will attempt to shine a light on the French naturalist’s extraordinary achievements and ground-breaking ideas, dating back to the 1740s. “Buffon was one of the very first people to postulate the change of species over time,” said Jason Roberts, author of a new book. Every living beingwhich will be published next week, on April 11. “He didn’t call it evolution—that word was coined later—but he was one of the first people to talk about it and suggest that there was some kind of system.”
In Natural History, a 36-volume book that Buffon worked on for 50 years, he also put forward the idea that animals were becoming extinct at a time when most natural historians believed that “God will never allow any species to ever disappear or does not arise over time”, according to Roberts. “The concept of species change and extinction has been very controversial.”
Similarly, Buffon’s observations on reproduction anticipated the discovery of DNA: “He suggested that there must be some kind of internal formation mechanism – that life exists on an organic cellular level and there is some kind of recipe or ‘internal form’ that reproduction must be. follows, to assemble the building blocks of cells into a particular type of organism.”
After inheriting a fortune from a distant relative, equivalent to around £28m today, Buffon used his wealth to turn a 100-acre park he owned in Burgundy into an “environmental laboratory”, where he “let things go wild and then observed what happened”, said Roberts.
“He has actually been described as the world’s first ecologist because he was the first person to actually study a species in its own environment, and not just a sample of a dead organism.”
Buffon observed everything that happened in his park, from the breeding habits of the foxes to the patterns of the birds and the trees in which they nested. “He was the first scientist to study life in its context and make vivid contextual observations.” said Roberts. “He would pay large sums of money for specimens of live animals so that he could see them and communicate with them.”
Instead of evolution, Buffon used the term “degeneration” to refer to a natural process “outside the regular process of reproduction” that brought about change in a species. The term did not have negative connotations then.
But Buffon never figured out how this species change actually happened: it took Darwin and his theory of natural selection to shed light on the process.
Even without this key insight, Buffon postulated that new species must have arisen and changed over time, while some species must have died out. “It was a very, very radical idea at the time, and Buffon was censured by the Sorbonne for it: he had to write a statement publicly renouncing everything he had written,” Roberts said. Buffon was later formally accused of heresy for suggesting that the earth was older than the biblical record.
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“Buffon suspected it was a matter of millions, if not billions, of years,” Roberts said. “He pioneered the idea of time on a geological scale.”
Unlike his contemporary Carl Linnaeus, who believed that nature was static and that each species remained exactly as God had created them, Buffon believed that nature was too complex and changeable to be easily categorized.
He was even concerned about the impact of human-caused climate change. “Buffon had enemies, because his message – that nature cannot be conquered, that people are in fact part of nature – was essentially disturbing to other people.”
Roberts said he quickly realized that the world was not receptive to his ideas. “He would make a statement like, ‘For species to change, one must imagine the earth to be millions of years old,’ hoping that one day people would be ready to hear it. But then he would have to add a sentence: ‘But of course, that’s ridiculous speculation. The Bible tells us otherwise.'”
As Buffon had to keep undermining his own observations, it was easy for Victorian naturalists to brush aside his contributions, suggesting – as Darwin did – that Buffon’s opinions “fluctuated much”, suggesting – as Darwin himself did – that Buffon’s opinions “varied a lot” .
Roberts hopes that his book will help to reassert Buffon’s rightful place in history: “The outrage that greeted Darwin in 1859 is well known,” he said. “Imagine if those ideas were asserted in 1759.”
