The French father of paleontology, the science of past plants and animals based on fossil evidence. Considered to be one of the greatest scientists of his day, Cuvier was adamantly opposed to the orthodox Christian view of creation and was committed to empirical science, trying to understand the incomplete fossil record. A catastrophist he believed that the fossil record, with its many gaps, indicated a cyclic history and also that there had not been one creation, as described in Genesis, but several periods, each laying down its geologic record, each destroyed by some catastrophe and buried, requiring that a fresh start be made. He concluded that the creation stories from many religions told of events (in the Bible, it was Noah\u2019s flood) from the most recent of these catastrophes.<\/p>\n
Cuvier was the first to search the fossil record for evidence of the extinction of species. To do that he developed a classification theory that laid the foundation of comparative anatomy. Although he thought that Earth was millions of years old, Cuvier did not believe in a slow process of evolution. In 1812, he said \u201cThere is little hope of discovering new species of large quadrupeds.\u201d That implied an Earth that was millions of years old, not the few thousand years of the theologians. He then had to explain why and how. The huge gaps in the fossil record persuaded him that the catastrophe theory best fitted the available evidence, with least recourse to speculation, least dependence on missing links, steps in an evolutionary chain for which there was no fossil record. Within any one period between catastrophes, he saw species as unchanging, not evolving; changes occurred when a new set of species was created after a catastrophe.<\/p>\n
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The French father of paleontology, the science of past plants and animals based on fossil evidence. Considered to be one of the greatest scientists of his day, Cuvier was adamantly opposed to the orthodox Christian view of creation and was committed to empirical science, trying to understand the incomplete fossil record. A catastrophist he believed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-210630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-b"],"yoast_head":"\n