Georges Cuvier
From EvoWiki
Georges Cuvier (23 August 1769 - 13 May 1832) was a French anatomist, paleontologist, and geologist, who worked at the Paris Museum of Natural History and is one of the most flamboyant figures in the general history of science. Cuvier excavated fossils from the Paris Basin of multiple species, and astonished European aristocracy and naturalists with his amazing ability to predict the general osteology of a specimen based only on limited material. He was also influential in elucidating the concept of catastrophism as opposed to uniformitarianism in geology, data in support of which he presented in an 1817 treatise Essay on the Theory of the Earth. Cuvier is generally thought of as a biblical saltationist, though this viewpoint has been questioned by some scholars.
Cuvier had rejected evolution because he thought that evolution would disrupt what he thought was the well-adaptedness of a species; evolution would involve going from one well-adapted configuration to another by way of some necessarily-poorly-adapted configurations. This we recognize as a simplistic view of adaptation—intermediates are not necessarily poorly-adapted—but in Cuvier's time, pre-Darwin, there was no detailed theory of evolution.
He also studied mummified cats and ibises from Egypt, and discovered that they closely resembled present-day ones; this seemed to him to be further evidence that evolution had not happened. But we now recognize that Pharaonic Egypt is very close in time to the present day by on the geological timescale.
However, he was the first to convincingly demonstrate that extinction had happened. Though the possibility of extinction may seem self-evident to most of us, a common view in his day was that God would never allow any of his created species to go extinct, and that seemingly-extinct species must still have living members somewhere. However, Cuvier studied the bones of some Pleistocene mammoths, and showed that they belonged to a species of elephant distinct from the living species of Africa and Asia. He also noted that nobody had ever claimed to see a live one -- and that an elephant is very difficult to hide. He concluded that every mammoth there ever was is now dead, and that extinction happens. He also concluded that this was also true of the elephantlike mastodon, the "Irish elk" (a giant deer), giant ground sloths, glyptodonts (giant armadillos), etc., meaning that mammoth extinction was not an isolated freak case.
But what would drive a species to extinction? Cuvier proposed that great catastrophes had done it, thus becoming an advocate of catastrophism.
