Georges Cuvier Research Articles

Explanation, teleology, and analogy in natural history and comparative anatomy around 1800: Kant and Cuvier

This paper investigates conceptions of explanation, teleology, and analogy in the works of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) and Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). Richards (2000, 2002) and Zammito (2006, 2012, 2018) have argued that Kant's philosophy provided an obstacle for the project of establishing biology as a proper science around 1800. By contrast, Russell (1916), Outram (1986), and Huneman (2006, 2008) have argued, similar to suggestions from Lenoir (1989), that Kant's philosophy influenced the influential naturalist Georges Cuvier. In this article, I wish to expand on and further the work of Russell, Outram, and Huneman by adopting a novel perspective on Cuvier and considering (a) the similar conceptions of proper science and explanation of Kant and Cuvier, and (b) the similar conceptions of the role of teleology and analogy in the works of Kant and Cuvier. The similarities between Kant and Cuvier show, contrary to the interpretation of Richards and Zammito, that some of Kant's philosophical ideas, whether they derived from him or not, were fruitfully applied by some life scientists who wished to transform life sciences into proper sciences around 1800. However, I also show that Cuvier, in contrast to Kant, had a workable strategy for transforming the life sciences into proper sciences, and that he departed from Kant's philosophy of science in crucial respects.

Morphological scientists at the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences in the 18th – early 20th centuries. To the 300th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences

The purpose of this work was to analyze the participation of domestic and foreign morphological scientists in the activities of the Imperial St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. From 1724 until 1917, a number of outstanding morphologists were elected as full members of the Academy, among them - anatomist and embryologist K.F. Wolf, anatomist A.E. Protasov, embryologist, geologist and paleontologist H.G. Pander, naturalist K. E. Beer, embryologist A. O. Kovalevsky, physiologist, histologist and zoologist F. V. Ovsyannikov, histologist A. S. Dogel, anthropologist, ethnographer and geographer D. N. Anuchin. The academy’s connections with foreign scientists also developed, many of whom were elected corresponding members and foreign honorary members of the academy, among them a number of morphologists, comparative anatomists and histologists. Thus, the following were elected as foreign honorary members: René Antoine Reaumur (1683 - 1757, elected in 1737); Albrecht Haller (1708 – 1777, elected 1776); in 1802 Georges Cuvier (1769 – 1732) was elected; in 1826 – Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749 – 1832); in 1905 - Camillo Golgi (1844 - 1926).
 Correspondents were elected as foreign members: in 1826 - Robert Brown (1773 - 1858), who in 1827 became a full member of the academy; in 1826, Karl Ernst Baer (1792 - 1876) was elected foreign corresponding member, who after moving to Russia became its ordinary academician (1827), and then after his resignation, its honorary member (1862); in 1832 - Johannes Peter Müller (1801 - 1852); in 1836 - Jan Evangelista Purkinje (1787 - 1869); in 1850 – Matthias Jacob Schleiden (1804 – 1881); in 1857 - Rudolf Albert Kölliker (1817 - 1905); in 1881 - Rudolf Virchow (1821 - 1902); in 1897 - Franz Leydig (1821 - 1908).
 Communication between foreign corresponding members and foreign honorary members was carried out with the academy in several directions, of which the main one was sending their works to the academy and publishing their works in the academy’s publications. Another direction was the training of students who were subjects of the Russian Empire, as well as the internship of young Russian researchers who were preparing for a professorship.

A History of Biology

A History of Biology

Les premiers sauroptérygiens (Reptilia, Sauropterygia) découverts dans le Trias français par Charles Antoine Gaillardot et leur interprétation par Georges Cuvier

The first sauropterygians (Reptilia, Sauropterygia) discovered in the Triassic of France by Charles Antoine Gaillardot and their interpretation by Georges Cuvier. Charles Antoine Gaillardot (1774-1833), a former military doctor in the French army, who returned to his hometown of Lunéville (Meurthe-et-Moselle department, north-eastern France), was the first to report the presence of bones in the Upper Muschelkalk (Ladinian, Middle Triassic) of Rehainviller and Mont-sur-Meurthe (France). He communicated these specimens to Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) who described and illustrated them in the last volume of the new edition of his Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles published at the end of 1824. According to Cuvier, these bones were those of an unknown “saurian” exhibiting supposed affinities with crocodiles, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and monitors (varans). Cuvier also thought he recognized the bones of a so-called “very large sea turtle”. A large part of this material, forgotten for two centuries, is still preserved in the collections of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris (MNHN) and is presented here for the first time since Cuvier's publication. Unpublished drawings found in Cuvier's archives kept at the central library of the MNHN also reveal specimens that he had mentioned without illustrating them. All this material represents the first sauropterygians discovered in the Triassic of France. Some of these specimens can notably be attributed to the nothosauroids (Nothosauroidea) Nothosaurus mirabilis Münster, 1834 and Simosaurus gaillardoti Meyer, 1842. Finally, the nomenclatural status of the many species introduced in the 19th century from this material is revised.

Plesiosaurs

In the early 19th century, long before the discovery of the dinosaurs, scientists and the public alike were faced with the realization that strange beasts, wholly extinct, were once populating Earth's ancient oceans. In no small part, this realization was through the discovery of the first plesiosaurs (and ichthyosaurs) along the Dorset coast of England in the seaside town of Lyme Regis. There was this large marine reptile resembling a large sea turtle, but with four evenly shaped flippers and looking as though a large snake had been pulled through its carapace. It was soon to be named scientifically Plesiosaurus, in reference to its greater similarity to living reptiles than the Ichthyosaurus (Figure 1). While the Ichthyosaurus was relatively easily understood as a fish-shaped reptile descended from land-living ancestors, the Plesiosaurus was beyond comprehension, even though incomplete skeletons had been unearthed already in the early 18th century. Plesiosaurs seemed so alien that the first complete skeleton, discovered by the famed Mary Anning a little more than 200 years ago (Figure 1A), was considered a fake by the leading anatomist of the day, the Baron Georges Cuvier in Paris. Only study of the original specimen convinced him of the authenticity of this animal but reinforced his seminal insight that there is extinction.

The Holothuria leucospilota genome elucidates sacrificial organ expulsion and bioadhesive trap enriched with amyloid-patterned proteins

Some tropical sea cucumbers of the family Holothuriidae can efficiently repel or even fatally ensnare predators by sacrificially ejecting a bioadhesive matrix termed the Cuvierian organ (CO), so named by the French zoologist Georges Cuvier who first described it in 1831. Still, the precise mechanisms for how adhesiveness genetically arose in CO and how sea cucumbers perceive and transduce danger signals for CO expulsion during defense have remained unclear. Here, we report the first high-quality, chromosome-level genome assembly of Holothuria leucospilota, an ecologically significant sea cucumber with prototypical CO. The H. leucospilota genome reveals characteristic long-repeat signatures in CO-specific outer-layer proteins, analogous to fibrous proteins of disparate species origins, including spider spidroin and silkworm fibroin. Intriguingly, several CO-specific proteins occur with amyloid-like patterns featuring extensive intramolecular cross-β structures readily stainable by amyloid indicator dyes. Distinct proteins within the CO connective tissue and outer surface cooperate to give the expelled matrix its apparent tenacity and adhesiveness, respectively. Genomic evidence offers further hints that H. leucospilota directly transduces predator-induced mechanical pressure onto the CO surface through mediation by transient receptor potential channels, which culminates in acetylcholine-triggered CO expulsion in part or in entirety. Evolutionarily, innovative events in two distinct regions of the H. leucospilota genome have apparently spurred CO's differentiation from the respiratory tree to a lethal defensive organ against predators.

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Capture: American Pursuits and the Making of a New Animal Condition

Consent Not to Be a (Human) Being

This essay produces a paradigmatic analysis of anti-Blackness from within the history and philosophy of biology in order to explore Frantz Fanon’s concept of ontological resistance. Through developing Sylvia Wynter’s notion of the Darwinian Imaginary alongside an Afropessimist paradigmatic analysis, the paper argues that scientific humanism’s claim that the Black is “the ostensible missing link between rational humans and irrational animals” (Wynter 2003: 266) is a form of metaphysical violence that the Black cannot ontologically resist. This heretical reading of three canonical figures in Western bioscience—Carl Linnaeus, George Cuvier, and Charles Darwin—is an attempt to synthesize Wynter’s demonic ground and Wilderson’s grammatology in order to develop a Black anti-philosophy of science that thinks antagonistically about what it means to be “the missing link” in the chain of Human being.

Spectacular remains: Black celebrity, death and the aesthetics of autopsy

ABSTRACT This article analyses two ‘famous’ dissections that go into the Black material interior of Victorian era celebrity: Sarah Baartman’s dissection by French scientist George Cuvier as it is rehearsed by press of the day and artists, biographers and historians in its aftermath and Mary Seacole’s description of her autopsy of a New Grenadian infant, a victim of cholera, in her 1857 Crimean war memoir. Both are infamous events in the spectacle of Black women’s celebrity bodies in the nineteenth century, elucidating how this celebrity is undergirded by cultures of death and, more acutely, dissection that haunt the radical rise in the classificatory scientific ‘order’ of the day. Within a historic culture of public autopsies and the pilfering of Black and poor cadavers from cemeteries to fuel medical education, this essay asks where do these famous dissections and their afterlives fit into the nineteenth-century narratives of race, science and sexuality? What can the fixation on the inside of the body tell us about the intersection of the nineteenth-century cultures of death, racial classification and celebrity? I argue that the racialised, sexualised cadaver and the act of autopsy are objects and authors of nineteenth-century Black women’s celebrity as surely as live, visual and print culture representations of the time.

Of Chimeras, Harmony, and Kintsugi: Towards a Historicist Epistemology of Paleontological Reconstruction, Theory-Change, and Exploring Heuristics

AbstractI analyze the epistemic strategies used by paleontologists (between 1830–1930) to reconstruct features of ancient organisms from fossilized bodies and footprints by presenting two heuristics: (1) a “claim of harmony” which posits the harmonious interaction of natural objects in order for complex systems to be simplified and (2) the “kintsugi heuristic” which is used inter-theoretically to explore new claims of harmony. I apply these to three successive historical cases: Georges Cuvier’s laws of correlation, the panpsychist paleontology of Edward Drinker Cope, and the single-character approach of Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Georges Cuvier's appeal for international collaboration, 1800

Georges Cuvier's appeal for international collaboration, 1800

A forgotten chapter in Egyptology: Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's investigations into a dynamic Nile

Recent landscape archaeology projects have assumed that previous generations of Egyptologists eschewed research into environmental change, with the exception of one mid nineteenth century pioneer, Joseph Hekekyan. This article shows that this narrative is mainly a historiographical artefact with little basis in reality: scholars and travellers in Egypt were interested in environmental change, mainly in relation to the River Nile, as far back as the early eighteenth century. Debate about the extent to which Egypt's present-day topography had been shaped by ongoing geomorphological processes on the one hand, and ancient catastrophic events on the other was particularly lively in the early years of the nineteenth century, as was linking such geographical research to historical problems. This article concentrates primarily on the work of one English Egyptologist, Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), in relation to the ancient extent of the Nile Delta, and of the agricultural lands of the Nile valley, at Thebes. Wilkinson followed leading catastrophist geologists, notably Georges Cuvier and Déodat Dolomieu, and investigated alluvial deposition in relation to ancient sites, including the Isle of Pharos, Alexandria, and the Colossi of Memnon, Thebes, in order to reconstruct the ancient landscape, and answer questions relating to Egyptian prehistory and political economy. Although Wilkinson's work may have fallen short of modern standards, it nevertheless demonstrates that early nineteenth century scholars appreciated that Egypt's landscape was dynamic rather than static, and that they used this knowledge to further their understanding of ancient Egyptian history.

Comparative analysis of the digestive system’s anatomical parts in two zoophagous bird species: White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) and Common Buzzard (Buteo buteo)

Aristotle in his anatomical observations is marking the beginning of functional anatomy followed by Georges Cuvier that formulate the low of the correlation of parts. According with this we can expect that the digestive system structures tend to be similar between species that consume approximately the same type of food. In this study we chose to evaluate macroscopic the digestive system of two different zoophytophagous species, with similar body size but different life behavior and feeding strategies: White Stork (Ciconia ciconia) and Common Buzzard (Buteo buteo). Data were collected after the dissection of 10 carcass (5 White Stork and 5 Common Buzzard). The digestive tract and its structures were measured and weighed. In common buzzard the beak is strong and short adapted for the laceration of the prey. In white stork the beak is long, strong, straight adapted to capture prey like a harpoon. In both species, the esophagus is located on the right side of the neck, the length is different, proportional to the neck. In common buzzard the crop is present and absent in white storks. The cuticle or koilin layer is highlighted in white stork compared to common buzzard. In common buzzard, the small intestine is reduced in size, without marked transition between the duodenum and the ileum. The white storks have a long small intestine with many loops, with no transition between the segments. In both species, the cecum is reduced in size and has a vestigial appearance; the colon is reduced in size, and extends from the level of the ileo-colic junction to the cloaca. The digestive system is adapted to a strictly carnivorous diet and the differences identified between the anatomical structures of the digestive tract of the two species are correlated with the differences of their feeding behavior.

Glacial Deaths, Geologic Extinction

AbstractIn 2019 several funerals were held for glaciers. If enough glaciers die, could they go extinct? Is there geologic extinction? Yes. This article develops three arguments to support this claim. The first revisits Georges Cuvier’s original argument for extinction and its reliance on geology, especially glaciers. Retracing connections to glaciers and the narrowing of extinction to biological species in the nineteenth century, the author argues that anthropogenic forcing on how the Earth system functions—the Anthropocene—warrants rethinking extinction geologically. The second argument examines the specificity of ice loss and multiple practices responding to this loss: from art exhibits at United Nations climate change meetings to anticolonial claims for the right to be cold. The third argument consolidates a theme built across the article regarding how Isabelle Stengers’s notion of ecologies of practices provides an approach to geologic extinction that recognizes both relational and nonrelational loss.

Here Be Monsters

Here Be Monsters

Two hundred years of zooplankton vertical migration research.

Vertical migration is a geographically and taxonomically widespread behaviour among zooplankton that spans across diel and seasonal timescales. The shorter-term diel vertical migration (DVM) has a periodicity of up to 1day and was first described by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier in 1817. In 1888, the German marine biologist Carl Chun described the longer-term seasonal vertical migration (SVM), which has a periodicity of ca. 1year. The proximate control and adaptive significance of DVM have been extensively studied and are well understood. DVM is generally a behaviour controlled by ambient irradiance, which allows herbivorous zooplankton to feed in food-rich shallower waters during the night when light-dependent (visual) predation risk is minimal and take refuge in deeper, darker waters during daytime. However, DVMs of herbivorous zooplankton are followed by their predators, producing complex predator-prey patterns that may be traced across multiple trophic levels. In contrast to DVM, SVM research is relatively young and its causes and consequences are less well understood. During periods of seasonal environmental deterioration, SVM allows zooplankton to evacuate shallower waters seasonally and take refuge in deeper waters often in a state of dormancy. Both DVM and SVM play a significant role in the vertical transport of organic carbon to deeper waters (biological carbon sequestration), and hence in the buffering of global climate change. Although many animal migrations are expected to change under future climate scenarios, little is known about the potential implications of global climate change on zooplankton vertical migrations and its impact on the biological carbon sequestration process. Further, the combined influence of DVM and SVM in determining zooplankton fitness and maintenance of their horizontal (geographic) distributions is not well understood. The contrasting spatial (deep versus shallow) and temporal (diel versus seasonal) scales over which these two migrations occur lead to challenges in studying them at higher spatial, temporal and biological resolution and coverage. Extending the largely population-based vertical migration knowledge base to individual-based studies will be an important way forward. While tracking individual zooplankton in their natural habitats remains a major challenge, conducting trophic-scale, high-resolution, year-round studies that utilise emerging field sampling and observation techniques, molecular genetic tools and computational hardware and software will be the best solution to improve our understanding of zooplankton vertical migrations.

‘Shattering’ and ‘Violent’ Forces: Gender, Ecology, and Catastrophe in George Eliot'sThe Mill on the Floss

This article argues that George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) aligns natural catastrophe with the image of the disastrous female body in order to challenge contemporary geological readings of nature as a balanced, self-regulating domain. Both incorporating and revising the work of Charles Lyell, Oliver Goldsmith, and Georges Cuvier, Eliot emphasises the interconnectedness of human and planetary processes, feminises environmental catastrophe, and blends human and ecological history. She does so in order to write the human presence back into geological histories that tended to evacuate the human, and to invite readers to account for the effects their lifestyles and industries have upon the supposedly balanced and orderly processes of nature.

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds., Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Since the days of her infamous exhibition in early nineteenth-century London and Paris and her posthumous dissection at the hands of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, the story of Sarah Baartman returned to public attention in 1985 with the publication of two ground-breaking articles by Stephen Jay Gould and Sander L. Gilman, who both remarked that Baartman’s remains were still on display at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. In 1994, newly elected President Nelson Mandela visited President Franc...

The mysterious death of Georges Cuvier (1832): An early case of severe Guillain–Barré syndrome?

Although Guillain-Barré syndrome was officially described in 1916, other cases had been reported earlier, such as some cases of Landry's paralysis. This year is the 250th anniversary of the birth of Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), one of the fathers of comparative anatomy and palaeontology: he died at age 63 from an unknown disease. By reading medical reports about his last days and hours, we conclude Cuvier died from a severe form of Guillain-Barré syndrome. Moreover, we think this observation could be the first complete report of acute polyradiculoneuropathy with pharyngeal-cervical-brachial onset.

Melville's Thinking Animal and the Classification Conundrum

Melville's Thinking Animal and the Classification Conundrum Elizabeth Heinz Swails (bio) On the third day of the hunt for Moby Dick, Ahab reflects upon his thinking and, in the third person, concludes, "Ahab never thinks; he only feels, feels, feels … to think's audacity," for God "only has that right and privilege." As if to account for his own bold and reckless behavior, he acknowledges that, if humans do think, then "thinking is, or ought to be, a coolness and a calmness." But, he concludes, "our poor hearts throb and our poor brains beat too much for that."1 When Ahab states that thinking should be cool and calm, Melville implicitly references Enlightenment reason's intellectual genealogy of rationality, which, in denying thinking's potential to beat, throb, and move organically as the heart and brain, determines who has the right to think and how. Melville further troubles these assumptions as Ahab realizes that the Pequod passed the ever-cunning, always moving Moby Dick in the night. Frustrated, Ahab claims that when he and the whale finally meet, it will be "forehead to forehead," meaning that the encounter will be as much mental—thought to thought—as physical (WHM, 6:565).2 Evoking Melville's thinking whale, this essay considers how the tortoises of "The Encantadas" (1854) and the swarms of "Benito Cereno" (1855) reveal a connection, however enigmatic, between the [End Page 325] way Melville's animals move and the way he portrays human thinking moving within the mind. What follows maps a series of moving thoughts that Melville, his scientific sources, and his human and nonhuman characters generated simultaneously. In "Sketch Fourth" of "The Encantadas," Melville augments and predicts Charles Darwin's portrayals of tortoise behavior in The Voyage of the Beagle (1839) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) by conveying how his thinking follows the enchanting paths Galapagos tortoises trod. While the tortoises invite the narrator to be embodied, moving thoughts together by participating in their ancient, languageless thinking, the narrator still imprisons and condemns the tortoises to death so the crew may feast upon their meat. Melville's thinking loops, without resolution, around the conundrum the narrator presents as he simultaneously recognizes the tortoises' intelligence and condemns the tortoises to their classificatory fate as "expendable" and "commodified bod[ies]."3 Melville takes his thought experiment a step further in "Benito Cereno" when Babo, a captive, exploited slave, defies nineteenth-century scientific racism's classificatory system by demonstrating his superior swarm intelligence. Against the animalized intellectual parameters Georges Cuvier outlines for different races in his The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization (1827–35), Melville illustrates a countereffect through Captain Delano's animalization.4 Though Melville shows how the human, Babo, thinks collectively with swarming bats, bees, and crows, Babo's animalized intelligence still faces the extermination classification imposes. Melville provides no solution to these conundrums but rather seems to ask readers how their own thinking evolves when they consider who, in this world, has the right and privilege to think. The notion that Melville's thinking moves through loops and countereffects contributes to the ongoing critical [End Page 326] conversation about his epistemology, especially his desire to think about thinking. But Melville's thinking about animal thinking remains rather elusive despite his preoccupation with thinking animals: white whales, steadfast tortoises, death-tick hummingbirds, oddly tame lizards, and prognostic albatrosses, to name a few. Maybe we are too apt to consider Melville's portrayal of animal intelligence with an artificial "coolness" and "calmness" because we assume humans are the only beings capable of complex thought. The antithesis of throbbing, beating, perpetually moving thoughts, cool and calm thoughts express the classificatory logic of Enlightenment reason. Melville famously mocks this logic's scientific application to animals in "Cetology" because any "systemized exhibition of the whale" is nothing but "the classification of the constituents of a chaos" (WHM, 6:134). He suggests that scientific classification's hierarchical, anthropocentric logic casts thinking not as the motion-bound chaos of nature from which it emerges, throbbing and beating, but as the systematic, linear, and fundamentally conclusive hallmark of humanity. Similarly, practitioners of classification take...