According
to Wolfram Research, Cuvier's students dressed up in devil costumes
and woke up their professor in the middle of the night. They chanted,
“Cuvier, Cuvier, we have come to eat you!”
Apparently
not the least bit fazed, Cuvier looked around at the “devils” and
said, All animals with horns are herbivores. You cannot eat me.”
Then he went back to sleep.
(I'm
sure you know that herbivores are animals that eat only plants. Some
examples of horned herbivores are rhinos, sheep, goats, bison,
cattle, giraffes, muskox, antelopes.)
Georges
Cuvier, born on this date in 1769, was a French zoologist (a
scientist who studies animals). He helped to establish two new fields
of study: comparative anatomy (studying the similarities and
differences between body structures) and paleontology (the study of
prehistoric life).
Cuvier
had strong opinions on all sorts of biological and geological
theories. For example, he thought that most fossils were mineralized
bones of animals that no longer existed. Well, he was right—and
this seems pretty obvious to us now, but in the late 1700s, many
people believed that no species had ever gone extinct. Cuvier thought
that the fossil record showed that animals didn't change and evolve
over time—that new species suddenly appeared and just as suddenly
(later) disappeared. He brought up the fact that mummified humans,
ibises (a kind of bird), and cats are just like modern humans,
ibises, and cats, and he said that that was evidence that animals
don't evolve. A scientist named Lamarck shrugged away this point,
pointing out that the Egyptian mummies Cuvier examined are only a few
thousand years old, not hundreds of thousands of years old (or, we
know now, millions of years old)—and, Lamarck argued, evolution
happened too slowly to show much change after only a few thousand
years. On this point, Cuvier was wrong and Lamarck was right. (But on
other discussion points, Lamarck was wrong and Cuvier right!)
Other
topics of inquiry during Cuvier's life include catastrophism (the
idea that lifeforms are sometimes impacted and even driven to
extinction by natural catastrophes), stratigraphy (the idea that
older sedimentary rocks lay under younger sedimentary rock
layers—which helps us figure out the relative age of fossils found
inside those rocks), and the “correlation of parts” (the idea
that the five bones in a bat's wing are related to the five fingers
in a human hand, and so on).
It's
interesting to me to see that scientists who are brilliant,
knowledgeable—even ahead of their time—can still be very wrong
about things. We can't judge ideas based only on how highly esteemed
the person saying them is—we have to look for evidence, and
sometimes we have to wait years for enough evidence. Eventually, data
showed that some of Cuvier's ideas were right and that others of his
ideas were wrong. (Just remember, though, if Cuvier had had the
luxury of being born in the twentieth or twenty-first century, when
soooooo much more is known about biology and sooooooooo many more
fossils have been found and dug up, he would almost assuredly see
eye-to-eye with today's scientists on these matters.)
Also
on this date:
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