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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon ( French: [ʒɔʁʒ lwi ləklɛʁ kɔ̃t də byfɔ̃]; 7 September 1707 – 16 April 1788) was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. He held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin du Roi, now called the Jardin des plantes .
Buffon's theory of degeneration attracted the ire of many early American elites who feared that Buffon's depiction of the New World would negatively influence European perceptions of their nation. [10] In particular, Thomas Jefferson mounted a vigorous defense of the American natural world.
This article is about the history of evolutionary thought in biology. For the history of evolutionary thought in the social sciences, see Sociocultural evolution. For the history of religious discussions, see History of the creation–evolution controversy.
His Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799) provided an empirical basis for this idea. White defended the theory of polygeny by rebutting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon 's interfertility argument, which said that only the same species can interbreed.
Buffon believed there was a single species creation event, and that different regions of the world were homes for varying species, which is an alternate view than that of Linnaeus. Buffon's law eventually became a principle of biogeography by explaining how similar environments were habitats for comparable types of organisms. [10]
The history of scientific thought about the formation and evolution of the Solar System began with the Copernican Revolution. The first recorded use of the term "Solar System" dates from 1704. [1] [2] Since the seventeenth century, philosophers and scientists have been forming hypotheses concerning the origins of our Solar System and the Moon and attempting to predict how the Solar System ...
Polygenism is a theory of human origins which posits the view that the human races are of different origins ( polygenesis ). This view is opposite to the idea of monogenism, which posits a single origin of humanity. Modern scientific views find little merit in any polygenic model due to an increased understanding of speciation in a human ...
At the time, the microscope was already available to researchers, and using it, the proponents of the theory, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, Buffon and John Needham, came to the conclusion that there is a life-generating force inherent to certain kinds of inorganic matter that causes living microbes to create themselves if given sufficient ...