Georges louis leclerc biography of michaels

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Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime; with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.

Ernst Mayr wrote that "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century".

Buffon held the position of intendant director at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des Plantes.

Early life

Georges Louis Leclerc later Comte de Buffon was born at Montbard, in the Province of Burgundy to Benjamin Francois Leclerc, a minor local official in charge of the salt tax and Anne-Christine Marlin also from a family of civil servants.

Among people deceased in 1788, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon ranks 2. At Angers in 1730 he made the acquaintance of the young English Duke of Kingston, who was on his grand tour of Europe, and traveled with him on a large and expensive entourage for a year and a half through southern France and parts of Italy.

There are persistent but completely undocumented rumors from this period about duels, abductions and secret trips to England.

Even worse, he had administered the family estate poorly and was forced to sell Buffon's holding of the village. Buffon said that food and the mode of living could make races degenerate and distinguish them from the original Caucasian race.

Believing in monogenism, Buffon thought that skin color could change in a single lifetime, depending on the conditions of climate and diet.

Buffon was an advocate of the Asia hypothesis; in his Histoire Naturelle, he argued that humans' birthplace must be in a high temperate zone.

Birds filled nine more volumes, and minerals five. What separated him from others was his empirical and philosophical pursuits of causes and explanations beyond the accepted explanations of his time. Buffon published a retraction, but he continued publishing the offending volumes without any change.

In the course of his examination of the animal world, Buffon noted that despite similar environments, different regions have distinct plants and animals, a concept later known as Buffon's Law.

This is considered to be the first principle of biogeography. Before him are Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744), and Georges Cuvier (1769). He said as much in his first volume of Natural History in 1749. But the discovery that the Siberian mammoth was not, in fact, quite the same species as the modern Indian or African elephant helped disprove that particular argument in the end.

With a fortune of about 80 000 livres Buffon set himself up in Paris to pursue science, at first primarily mathematics and mechanics, and the increase of his fortune.

Career

In 1732 he moved to Paris, where he made the acquaintance of Voltaire and other intellectuals. After 15 volumes, he'd only gotten to the letter M (as in monkey).

What he hoped to learn from these experiments was the age of the Earth. Jefferson and the Giant Moose by Lee Alan Dugatkin

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