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What Is Cuvier Catastrophism?
Catastrophism is the doctrine proposed by the remarkable French zoologist and comparative paleontologist, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), that major changes in the earth's crust result from geologic catastrophes, such as eruptions of “supervolcanoes”*, rather than by slow evolutionary processes, such as alluvial depositions and small volcanic eruptions. Englishman Charles Darwin and Scottish geologist Charles Lyell belittled Cuvier, contending that real scientists build their theories only on what they observe directly in nature and not on wild imaginings of unobserved forces. Professor Martin Rudwick and author Edmund Blair Bolles are promoting a renaissance of Cuvier’s ideas through their books “ Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts” (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and “The Ice Finders: How a Poet, a Professor, and a Politician Discovered the Ice Age” (Perseus Books, 2000).
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) Cuvier’s study of fossils in rock strata in the environs of Paris led to one of his greatest discoveries: species become extinct. This idea was understandably hard to swallow for many people in the 19 th and 20 th centuries and even today because of its corollary that humans might one day become extinct. Even though Cuvier detested “theories” and strongly advocated “facts”, he expertly laid out his own theory on species extinction in his very readable “Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes which They Have Produced in the Animal Kingdom” published in 1825**. In this discourse, Cuvier notes that the current appearance of the earth belies its violent history. “When the traveler goes through fertile plains where tranquil waters nourish with their regular flow an abundant vegetation, …he is not tempted to believe that nature has…had its internal wars and that the surface of the earth has been overthrown by revolutions and catastrophes. But his ideas change as soon has he seeks to dig through this soil, today so calm, or when he takes himself up into the hills which border the plain; ideas expand, so to speak, with what he is looking at. They begin to embrace the extent and the grandeur of the ancient events as soon as he climbs up the higher mountains …or when he follows the stream beds which descend from these mountains…” Cuvier discovered the first proofs of earth upheavals in the mountains where ancient strata are tilted up in oblique layers and overlain with more recent horizontal layers of sand loaded with sea shells, the remains of marine animals. Cuvier was surprised to find that the sea shells in the mountains were unlike any common shells that he had dug up in the Paris basin once submerged by saltwater. Where the oblique layers were not very high, he found that their summits were even crowned with horizontal strata containing sea shells. He reasoned that the mountains existed before the horizontal layers were laid down by a calm sea. Either the mountains then lifted up or the sea level dropped. Cuvier then asserted that these types of earthly revolutions have been numerous. His proof lay in the various layers and the products of life that they contain and which he directly observed and meticulously catalogued. The fossils and type of stones change depending on the strata. The strata vary depending on the nature of the liquid (e.g., salt or fresh water) and the materials which it held in solution. Cuvier wrote, “Thus in animal nature a succession of variation has taken place, brought about by changes in the liquid where the animals lived…” Cuvier asserted that earthly revolutions have been sudden as well as numerous. He wrote, “But it is …really important to note that these eruptions and repeated retreats [of the sea] were not at all slow and did not all take place gradually,” which is what Lyell and Darwin contended. He demonstrated this fact by noting that during the most recent of these earthly catastrophes, “which by double movement inundated and later left dry our present continents or at least a great part of the land which forms them today,” cadavers of great quadrupeds became locked in the ice [e.g., in Siberia]. If they had not been frozen as soon as they were killed, decay would have caused them to decompose. On the other hand, this permanent freezing was not a factor previously in the places where these animals were trapped. For they would not have been able to live in such a temperature. Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. “The very force of the movements which the bodies of water experienced is still attested to by the mountain of remains and rounded pebbles interposed in many places between the solid layers. Thus, life on this earth has often been disturbed by dreadful events. Innumerable living creatures have been victims of these catastrophes. Some inhabitants of dry land have seen themselves swallowed up by floods; others living in the ocean depths when the bottom of the sea was lifted up suddenly were placed on dry land. Their very races were extinguished for ever, leaving behind nothing in the world but some hardly recognizable debris for the natural scientist. “Such are the conclusions to which we are necessarily led by the objects which we meet at every step and which we can verify at every instant in almost every country. These huge and terrible events are clearly printed everywhere for the eye which knows how to read the story in their monuments. But what is even more astonishing and what is no less certain is that life has not always existed on the earth and that it is easy for the observer to recognize the point where life began to deposit her productions.” Cuvier discovered that when he kept moving up the great mountain ridges, he found that the remains of marine animals became increasingly rare and eventually disappeared altogether. Cuvier then counseled that “it is vain for someone to seek in the forces which affect the surface of the earth today causes sufficient to produce the upheavals and catastrophes whose traces the earth’s surface shows us…[F]or a long time we thought we could explain earlier revolutionary upheavals by present causes, just as we readily explain past events in political history, when we know well the passions and the intrigues of our own times” (he is referring to the French Revolution through which he lived). Collapses, alluvial deposits, sand dunes, stalactites, coral reefs, volcanoes, astronomical causes and other forces that change the configuration of the surface of the earth cannot explain “overturned strata, large quadrupeds enclosed in ice, shell fish on dry land as well preserved today as if they had been caught while still alive,” or whole species and even genera that have become extinct. “These arguments have forcibly impressed the great majority of natural scientists. And among those who have sought to explain the present state of the earth, hardly anyone has attributed it entirely to slow causes, even less to causes working before our very eyes.” Cuvier dismissed ancient systems of geologists which acknowledged only two events: the Creation and the Flood. Observable geologic and paleontologic records dictate otherwise. No one stressed better that Cuvier the importance of fossils in geology. The relationship between the fossils and the strata in which they were found are critical to the birth of the theory of the earth as a succession of epochs and a series of different events. “Fossils alone, in fact, establish reliably that the earth has not always had the same crust…If we had only formations without fossils, no one could have claimed that these formations were not formed all together.” Further, Cuvier sharply discredited the excessive antiquity attributed to certain peoples, e.g., Indians, Chaldeans, and Egyptians; it has no historical basis. About the Indians, he said; “The deplorable state of historical knowledge was necessarily that of a people where the hereditary priests of a cult, grotesque in its exterior forms and cruel in many of its precepts, alone had the privilege of writing, preserving, and interpreting books. Some legend created to make fashionable a place of pilgrimage and fabrications appropriate to impress more deeply the respect for their caste must have interested them more than all historical truth.” Finally, Cuvier turned the world upside down when he noted that there are no human bones found among the fossilsin the ancient strata on the surface of the earth. Cuvier concludes: “Everything therefore leads to the belief that, in the same time period as the upheavals which buried the fossil bones, the human species did not exist at all in the countries where the bones are discovered. For there would have been no reasons why the humans species would have escaped entirely such universal catastrophes and why their remains are not found nowadays like those of other animals. “But I do not wish to conclude from this that human beings did not exist at all before this period. They cold have inhabited some regions of small extent from where they repopulated the earth after these terrible events. Perhaps also the places where they remained were entirely destroyed and their bones buried in the bottom of the present seas, with the exception of a small number of individuals who continued the species. ..The establishment of human beings …is necessarily not only after the revolutionary upheavals which buried these bones, but also after those revolutions which brought about the exposure of those layers which contain them and which are the last ones the earth has undergone.” Editorial Note: Human societies are so young! Only 150 or so years ago did we figure out and, after great exertion by scientific leaders such as Louis Agassiz ( 1807-1873; Cuvier’s pupil), persuade most people to believe that sheets of ice repeatedly covered the Northern Hemisphere. The theories proposed by Cuvier, Lyell and Darwin fit together better than any one of the three men might imagine. According to one source, we now know that “approximately 99% of all species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Most of these species disappeared in a Darwinian trickle—what paleontologists call ‘background extinctions.’ But several times over the past 600 million years, life has experienced mass extinctions, in which half or more of all species alive at the time disappeared in fewer than two million years—a blink of a geological eye. The causes may include asteroids, volcanoes, or relatively fast changes in sea level. These extinctions mark some of the great transitions in life, where new groups of species got the opportunity to take over the niches of old ones. Mammals, for example, only dominated the land after giant dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago.”*** A conflation of Cuvier’s theory with those of Lyell and Darwin is called “punctuated equilibrium”, that is, “a theory of evolution that postulates that changes such as speciation can occur relatively quickly, with long periods of little change in between. This theory is one of the proposed explanations of the evolutionary patterns of species as observed in the fossil record, particularly the relatively sudden appearance of new species in a geologically short time period, and the perhaps typical lack of substantial change of species during their existence.” ****
Notes and sources: *For more information on supervolcanoes, see SEMP Biot #164: “Yellowstone Is a Supervolcano??” available at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_164.html. **G. Cuvier: “Discourse on the Revolutionary Upheavals on the Surface of the Globe and on the Changes which They Have Produced in the Animal Kingdom” available online at: www.victorianweb.org/science/science_texts/cuvier/cuvier-e.htm. *** “Extinctions: Georges Cuvier” available online at http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/history/extinction2.shtml. ****Source of definition of “punctuated equilibrium” is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium. |
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