Georges-Louis Leclerc proposed species change and extinction back in the 1740s, a new book reveals
Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages are laughably like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words.”, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, as one of the “few” people who had understood that species change and evolve, before Darwin himself.
“He has actually been described as the world’s first ecologist, because he was the first person to really study a species in its own environment, and not just a specimen of a dead organism.” Even without this key insight, Buffon postulated that new species must have come into existence and changed over time, while some species must have gone extinct. “That was a very, very radical idea at the time, and Buffon was censured for it by the Sorbonne: he had to write a statement publicly renouncing everything he had written,” said Roberts. Buffon was later formally accused of heresy for implying that Earth was older than the biblical record.
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