BIPN 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Denis Diderot, Carl Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier
13 Jun 2018
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BILD 3 Lecture 1
4/2/2017
• Aristotle (384-322 BCE)
o Greek philosopher, teacher, earliest recorded natural historian
o Said that species are continuous with graded differences from one to the next
o Did’t hae a reatio arratie, ut he elieed i the infinity of time and
fiit of speies→species are not derived from earlier forms
• Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)
o Reasoed through eperiets that the great flood ould’t hae arried shells
embedded high up in rocks that peasants had brought him from the mountain,
aials had’t oed the shells there o their o, therefore, the shells ust
have originated there
• Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778)
o Botanist and medical doctor
o His goal was to exalt god by categorizing nature to understand his creations
o He was the first to classify organisms into nested, hierarchical categories
o He grouped them of similarity because of divine plan, not because of relatedness
• Age of Enlightenment in 18th century Europe
o Rise of intellectualism→the combining of science and philosophy
o Said that individuals possess the ability of reason and critical thinking
▪ Came in response to a long history of war and the concentration of
wealth and power among very few
o Was centered around coffee houses in England and France
• Denis Diderot (1713-1784)
o Philosopher and writer
o Was a master of rhetoric→this was he kept himself out of imprisonment
• The French Revolution and Birth of Modern Natural History
o France was a focal point→its radical and liberal ideas fueled the French
Revolution from 1789-1799
o During colonial expansion, specimens were collected everywhere and brought
back to Europe, making European scientists aware of the outside world
• The three major contemporaries on the Faculty of the Jardin du Plantes
o Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)
▪ Paleontologist
▪ Recognized that fossils represent animals that once but no longer walked
the earth
▪ Postulated that catastrophic events led to extinctions and were followed
by subsequent rounds of creation
▪ He did not believe in species mutability; he used mummified Egyptian
speies as proof that hage had’t happeed
o Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772-1844)
▪ Naturalist
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