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Buffon's needle problem. The a needle lies across a line, while the b needle does not. In probability theory, Buffon's needle problem is a question first posed in the 18th century by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon: [1] Suppose we have a floor made of parallel strips of wood, each the same width, and we drop a needle onto the floor.
Social degeneration was a widely influential concept at the interface of the social and biological sciences in the 18th and 19th centuries. During the 18th century, scientific thinkers including Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, and Immanuel Kant argued that humans shared a common origin but had degenerated over time due to differences in climate.
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 works influenced the next two generations of ...
The French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788) and the German anatomist Johann Blumenbach (1752–1840) were proponents of monogenism, the concept that all races have a single origin. Buffon and Blumenbach believed a "degeneration theory" of the origins of racial difference.
Later in the 18th century, the French philosopher Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, one of the leading naturalists of the time, suggested that what most people referred to as species were really just well-marked varieties, modified from an original form by environmental factors. For example, he believed that lions, tigers, leopards, and ...
Objections to evolution have been raised since evolutionary ideas came to prominence in the 19th century. When Charles Darwin published his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution (the idea that species arose through descent with modification from a single common ancestor in a process driven by natural selection) initially met opposition from scientists with different ...
Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier ( French: [ʒɔʁʒ kyvje] ), was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". [1] Cuvier was a major figure in natural sciences research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in ...
Polygenism. 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 ...