Even the most impressive scientists can make mistakes
TDale Gnidovec
he French scientist Jean Leopold Nicolas Frederic Cuvier, more commonly referred to simply as Georges Cuvier, was a towering figure in science in the early 1800s.
He was among the first scientists to use fossils to correlate rocks; was the first to recognize that the Mesozoic Era was an age of reptiles; named the mastodon; named Pterodactylus and recognized it as a flying reptile; correctly identified the mosasaur as a giant swimming lizard; was the first to prove extinction; and correctly identified the skeleton of a strange fossil animal from South America as a sloth but one too big to have lived in trees — a ground sloth.
Unfortunately, he has gotten a bit of a bad reputation because in one area of science he happened to be wrong. Cuvier did not believe evolution occurred.
He had what appeared to be strong scientific evidence for that conclusion. The story of that evidence was the subject of a recent article published in the journal PLOS Biology, and it is a fascinating chapter in the history of science.
In 1798, the French army under Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Egypt. The army absconded with many items of cultural and natural history, including the Rosetta Stone, which allowed archaeologists to decipher the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics (although the Stone never made it to France, having been captured by the British).
Among the many treasures that the French army took back to France were hundreds of mummies. When we think of ancient Egyptian mummies we usually think of humans, but the Egyptians mummified many animals as well, including cats, dogs, birds, baboons, crocodiles, fish and even snakes.
Among them was the ibis, which the Egyptians considered sacred. And they mummified a lot of the large wading birds: The complex of catacombs at Tuna elGebel is estimated to contain four million ibis mummies. Some were wrapped in linen, some placed in wooden caskets, and others were sealed in pottery jars or dipped in resin.
In the late 1700s, most of them were misidentified as mummies of the stork, and here is where Cuvier came in. He correctly identified them as ibises, but went further. He could detect no differences between the skeletons of these ancient birds and their modern counterparts. So he concluded that species are fixed, and evolution doesn’t take place.
He presented his conclusions in 1802. His contemporary, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, argued that a mere 2,000 or 3,000 years was not long enough for the ibis to have changed, especially since no great environmental changes had occurred in Egypt during that time.
Cuvier wasn’t convinced, and continued to study the ibis and to argue for its unchanging nature, even mentioning it in a somewhat spiteful eulogy on Lamarck that he wrote when Lamarck died in 1836.
This was decades before Darwin published his “On the Origin of Species” in 1859, but some scientists think Cuvier’s ideas held back the scientific acceptance of evolution even then. It just shows how much influence a strong personality, backed by certified scientific credentials, can have even when wrong.