The significance of Cuvier's work for the further development of science. Cuvier's theory of catastrophes. Scientific works of Georges Cuvier and his theory of catastrophes

Georges Cuvier was born in 1769. His contemporaries had something to tell their grandchildren, but they did not often live up to such an idyll.

Cuvier's peers laid their heads under the knife of the Paris guillotine and died of cholera at the foot of the Egyptian pyramids, drowned at Trafalgar and froze to death on the old Smolensk road, died in honor of the emperor at Leipzig and were shot in the name of the king after Waterloo. 1769 is also the year of Napoleon's birth.

Cuvier received his higher education at the Karolinska Academy, the same one that Friedrich Schiller had recently graduated from at the Faculty of Medicine. It's funny that Cuvier himself chose the Faculty of Administration. But if the genius German poet quickly left the medical profession, the famous French naturalist remained an administrator until his death. In the era of the Directory, he became a member of the Commission for the Arts, at the consulate - the secretary of the National Institute, during the empire - a member of the Council of State. The change of regimes and rulers only contributed to his career. Louis XVIII makes Cuvier Baron and President of the Committee of the Interior, Charles X - Knight of the Legion of Honor and Director of all non-Catholic cults, Louis Philippe - Peer of France and President of the Council of State.

Despite the ever-increasing administrative responsibilities, Georges Cuvier continued to read fascinating lectures, publish multivolume studies, and discover new facts unknown to science. He studied his favorite natural science during bureaucratic debates, at the dinner table while waiting for his next meal, and even in the carriage, sitting down with a manuscript on a special table. Ten minutes was enough time for him to get down to work. He did a lot, but did not have time to complete all his plans. “The materials were prepared, everything was located in my head, I could only write,” complained Cuvier three days before his death.

This was a feature of his work: books were not written, but recorded. They already existed, page after page, in the depths of his inexhaustible memory. This method of creativity was facilitated by both the outstanding talent of the draftsman, and the logical type of thinking, placing all the material on the shelves, and most importantly - the enormous knowledge that he began to accumulate in childhood.

During his school years, little freckled, bright red Georges was fond of Buffon's Natural History, which came out in those years volume after volume. The boy took these volumes from his relative and read avidly, then re-read them again, carefully studying the engravings.

Many years later, Academician Cuvier wrote in his autobiography: “My greatest childhood joy was to copy images of animals and paint according to the description. I dare say that thanks to this activity I became so familiar with tetrapods and birds that few naturalists knew these animals as well as I did at the age of 12-13. But, what is especially curious, the boy also tried to draw those animals, images of which were not in the books, guided only by the descriptions of the author. Perhaps it was here that the talent for predicting the appearance of extinct animals began to develop, which so shocked the scientific world Cuvier later.

Over the years, he was carried away by other naturalists.

First, Linnaeus, whose book "The System of Nature" Georges received as a gift from his professor. Then Aristotle, about whose biological works Cuvier wrote: "I admire the more, the more often I reread them." Finally, Jussier, who created the first natural plant system. Nevertheless, Nature herself remained the main teacher. The industrious young man compiled a herbarium, having dried more than three thousand plants, sketched over a thousand insects, learned to make dissections, having acquired the first experience in comparative anatomy.

After graduating from the Stuttgart Academy, Cuvier, along with his friend Georges Parrot, could get to Russia. Georges, or, as they later called him, Yegor Ivanovich, Parrot left for Petersburg, where he later became an academician, and Georges Cuvier, who was weak in health, left Germany and went as a tutor to the count's son in Normandy.

There was a revolution in Paris, and Cuvier's letters to his friends in Stuttgart were filled with political passions and scientific problems. In his free hours, the young naturalist wanders around the castle and along the seashore, collecting molluscs, catching insects, studying crustaceans, and sometimes goes to the patriotic club of a neighboring town, where there is an ongoing debate.

One day, while listening to a speech by a doctor at a local hospital, Cuvier caught a familiar thought. Approaching the speaker after the meeting, he told him: “I read your article in the encyclopedia. You are Tessier. " Cuvier's interlocutor, abbot and academician Tessier, who knew the revolutionary mood of the young man, exclaimed: “I am lost. I am hiding here under a false name. " But Cuvier reassured him. This is how their friendship began.

Soon Tessier wrote to the botanist Antoine Jussier in Paris: “Remember that I brought the academy of D'Alembert; this is also D'Alembert, in another area. " Tessier's recommendations, and especially the manuscripts of the young scientist, made a proper impression on both Jussier and Professor Etain Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In the spring of 1795, Cuvier arrived in Paris, starting a new, brilliant chapter in his life.

The name Cuvier is known in our time by every cultured person. But if you ask a non-specialist what he is famous for, then, as a rule, they will talk about one advantage of a scientist and one of his shortcomings. A great zoologist could restore the appearance of a fossil animal one by one (this is a virtue). He denied evolution, relying on the theory of world catastrophes (this is a flaw). As is often the case, Cuvier's flaws were a continuation of his merits,

The gay area of Parisian bohemia - Montmartre - was at that time a deserted city suburb. Here Cuvier and his friend geologist Alexander Bronyar began excavations. From the bowels of the earth, traces of a long-lost life were extracted. In the albums accumulated over thirty years of work, drawings of creatures have never been seen by man: anoploteria and paleotherium, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, mastodons and rhinos. And all these waters Cuvier solved the same problem: why did each of the layers of the Tertiary era, in which they found animal cemeteries, had its own fauna? The accumulated material was too scarce to catch the transitional forms of evolution. But the turbulent Tertiary era, when the seas were advancing on land, mountain ranges were piled up and volcanoes bubbled, prompted the simplest solution: disasters.

The slow development of life eluded Cuvier's usually keen eyes. And the pile-up of the bones of rapidly extinct animals gave the scientist confidence in the correctness of his conclusion. It should be noted that in our days, when the idea of evolution has finally triumphed, the mass death of dinosaurs and a number of other problems that do not have a clear solution, make us remember the teachings of the French naturalist. At that time, the works of Buffon, Oken, Lamarck and other supporters of the evolutionary hypothesis were not rigorous enough and therefore seemed to the skeptical mind of Cuvier to be unfounded fantasies.

It is no coincidence that in a laudatory speech to the deceased, Lamarck Cuvier writes about two types of scientists. Some strictly follow the facts and substantiate each of their conclusions by experience, while others, making outstanding discoveries, “could not refrain from adding fantastic concepts; confident in the ability to outstrip experience and calculation, they diligently build vast buildings on imaginary foundations, like the enchanted castles of our old novels ... ". Cuvier attributes Lamarck to this particular type and, analyzing one of his too bold hypotheses, not without malice writes that she “can amuse the poet's imagination, a metaphysician can deduce a whole new generation of systems from it; but it cannot even for a moment support the investigation of anyone in the dissection of a hand, viscera, or just a feather. "

The creator of modern comparative anatomy, historical geology, paleontology of vertebrates, the author of capital studies on which generations of naturalists studied, Cuvier played a paradoxical role in science: with his works he prepared the victory of that evolutionary idea against which he fought all his life. The author of an excellent modern monograph on Cuvier, I. I. Kanaev, quotes his favorite phrase: "I am only Perugino." Comparing himself with Raphael's teacher, the remarkable French scientist seemed to predict the future flowering of natural science, foresaw the appearance of a genius, opening new horizons for biology. And he was right. In 1831, when the scientific world was vigorously discussing the just ended dispute between two old friends of Geoffroy de Saint-Hilaire and Cuvier, a young Englishman who came to Paris to consult with Cuvier, Charles Lyell, had already taken the first volume of his evolutionary "Foundations of Geology" and another Englishman, also Charles, was already leafing through Cuvier's works on board the Beagle sailing to America.

The brilliant biologist did not live to see the triumph of his students and opponents. On Tuesday, May 8, 1832, after giving a lecture, brilliant as always, he felt a numbness in his hand. On May 12, almost paralyzed, he said to a visiting friend: "Look how far the Tuesday man is from the Saturday man." The next day he was gone.

Cuvier's successes as a taxonomist are closely related to his achievements in the field of comparative anatomy. With the help of a scalpel, it was easy to discover what was in common in the structure of animals. This made it possible to achieve a stricter classification. On the other hand, it is easier to compare parts of animals in systematically close groups. Back in Normandy, the young naturalist felt the guiding power of comparative anatomy. Investigating the structure of mollusks, coelenterates, and worms thrown out by the sea, Cuvier came to the conclusion that his beloved Linnaeus was mistaken in combining these so different organisms into one class. In one of his first scientific works, Cuvier proposes a new classification of invertebrates, dividing them into four classes: insects, molluscs, crayfish and worms.

Belief in the methods of comparative anatomy led to the fact that Cuvier encroached on another of his biological idols - Aristotle.

The great Hellene created the doctrine of the "ladder of beings". Each next rung of this ladder, on which the entire animal world was located, automatically meant a higher level of organization, clearly demonstrating the escalation of complexity from the simplest to humans. However, in a number of cases, Aristotle's tempting idea refused to work. The anatomical structure of animals was so fundamentally dissimilar that their comparison became simply impossible, which means that the question of who is more complicated lost all meaning. The Aristotle staircase tottered.

In 1812, a small article by Cuvier exploded the traditional classification of animals that came from antiquity. Instead of the primary division of this kingdom into vertebrates and invertebrates, the scientist proposed to divide them into four types: vertebrates, mollusks, articulated and zoophytes. Cuvier's revolutionary idea transformed the existing taxonomy: four independent stems replaced Aristotle's ladder. The author of the new classification himself believed that there was nothing in common between the representatives of these types, the deep anatomical features divided them once and for all. Each type is built according to its own original plan.

The type of vertebrates has a pronounced skeleton, to the bones of which muscles are attached. The spinal cord and brain are protected by the bony membrane, there are distinct organs of all five senses. Molluscs never have such a skeleton, and the muscles attach to the leathery membrane, inside which, together with the viscera, are located nerve centers connected to each other. A different plan of the structure in articulated. Their shell is divided into a certain number of segments, to the walls of which muscles are attached from the inside. Two long cords that run along the intestines form the nervous system. One of the knots of these cords, located above the pharynx, is called the brain. In terms of its size, it is no larger than the others. As for zoophytes (tracing paper of this name "animals - plants"), their main difference is the change of bilateral symmetry to circular. They do not have a well-defined nervous system. In terms of the homogeneity of their tissues, they are more like plants than animals.

The most important work of his life - the four-volume "Animal Kingdom, Distributed by Its Organization" Cuvier released in 1817. He marked the highest point reached in science by the renowned naturalist. All subsequent works only specified, expanded, supplemented this masterpiece of zoology. It is no coincidence that Cuvier brought his autobiography to 1817, the date of his creative peak.

The system he created, which seemed so complete to his contemporaries, has not survived to this day. The first three types, although preserved, but with a greatly changed content, and zoophytes split into sponges, coelenterates, echinoderms, and other types. Instead of four Cuvier branches, modern taxonomy counts many more! However, one should not think that his merits are in the apt name of the highest classification group. It just happened later. The main thing that has stood the test of time is Cuvier's method, based on comparative anatomical features, on the principle of correlation of parts, on a thoughtful assessment of the general architectonics of the structure of organisms. Modern science also follows this path.

The famous biologist believed that taxonomy resembles a kind of anti-dictionary. In the dictionary by name, we look for the properties of the object, but here, on the contrary, knowing the characteristics of the animal, we find its name. But this is not the end of it. Indeed, at the same time, kinship ties of the species being defined with many others are established, which means that we learn about many of its additional features, relationships, history, we can distinguish fundamental features from subordinates, distinguish ancient features from young ones. Cuvier believed that the progress of taxonomy will lead someday to the construction of a natural system, where the neighborhood in the table will strictly correspond to the proximity of the structure. In The Animal Kingdom, he wrote that "a natural system would constitute the whole of science, and every step towards it brings science closer to its goal." Denying evolution, considering species to be practically unchanged, Cuvier naturally believed that this fixed goal would sooner or later be achieved.

Evolutionary biology did not negate the scientist's ideas in systematics, but gave them other accents, communicated some inner dynamism. It turned out, for example, that there are no insurmountable gaps between the types of animals and that the natural system is not a precisely designated limit, but a shaky line.

At the zenith of fame, Cuvier describes his great correspondence teachers as follows: “Linnaeus and Buffon, it seems, really possessed, each in their own way, such qualities that could not be combined in one person ... The first, frightened by chaos, in which the negligence of his predecessors left the History of Nature, managed, with the help of a simple system and short, clear definitions, to establish order in this huge labyrinth, as well as to facilitate the cognition of individual creatures. The second, outraged by the dryness of the writers, who for the most part were content with one precision, managed to arouse in us an interest in these separate creatures, thanks to the merits of his harmonious and poetic language. Sometimes, tired of the difficult study of Linnaeus, we rest with Buffon. But every time, admired and touched by enchanting pictures, we want to return to Linnaeus in order to arrange these enchanting images by classes, fearing to keep only a vague memory of them. "

This long quote is the best evidence that Cuvier himself so happily merged two talents - severity and poetry, which he considered incompatible in one person. And his scientific merits are not limited to what he discovered, proved, changed, but also to the fact that he excited, amazed, fascinated, by the fact that he attracted many young people into science who so decisively changed his legacy and so irrevocably approved it. immortality.

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Georges Cuvier is a great scientist-zoologist, the founder of comparative animal anatomy and paleontology. This person amazes with his desire to study the world around him, and, despite some erroneous views, he made his considerable contribution to the development of science.

Childhood of a scientist

Cuvier was born on August 23, 1769 in Montbéliard, France. Little Georges was smart beyond his years: already at the age of 4 he read well, and his mother taught him to draw. The ability to paint was also useful to the scientist in his work on paleontology, where he drew illustrations for books by hand. These illustrations were then copied for a long time in other printed publications, so high quality and believable they were made.

Georges Leopold Cuvier lived in a poor Protestant family. His father was already aged, served in the French army as a soldier, and his mother devoted her life to her son. She worked with him, and also raised him to his feet after another illness (Cuvier often fell ill in childhood).

Education

The school years of the future scientist flew by quickly. Georges Cuvier proved to be a talented student, but he had a rebellious character. It was originally planned that the boy would continue his studies at a theological school and receive the title of pastor, but the strained relationship with the director did not allow him to become a priest of the Protestant church.

Georges Cuvier received his further education at the Karolinska Academy at the Faculty of Cameral Sciences (State Property Management). Here in Stuttgart, the scientist studied hygiene, law, economy and finance. Already at the university, he was fond of the animal world, so with his participation a circle "Academy" was organized. This association existed for 4 years - this is how much Georges studied at the faculty. The members of the circle shared their small achievements in the study of nature, prepared speeches. Those who distinguished themselves were awarded an impromptu medal made of cardboard with the image of Lamarck.

Georges Cuvier - biography of a scientist at the crossroads of life's path

Four years of student life flew by unnoticed, and Georges returned home to his parents. The father had already retired, the mother did not work. As a result, the family budget was practically empty, which, undoubtedly, could not be ignored.

Then rumors reached the scientist that Count Erisi from Normandy was looking for a home teacher for his son. Being an educated man, Georges Cuvier packed his suitcases and went for a part-time job. The house of the famous count was located on the seashore, and this made it possible for Georges to see marine life not only on paper, but also in person. He boldly opened starfish, sea worms, fish, crabs and crayfish, molluscs. Then Georges Cuvier was surprised at how complex the structure of at first glance the simplest living organisms is. Numerous vessels, nerves, glands and organ systems simply amazed the scientist. His work with marine animals was described in the journal Zoological Bulletin.

The first research in the field of paleontology

The end of the 18th century is the birth of paleontology. Cuvier, as the founder of this science, made a great contribution to its development. His first experience is connected with the case when he received a package with the bones of a creature found in Maastricht. Hoffan (that was the name of the resident of this city who found the remains) decided to send the skeleton to the then already famous Cuvier in Paris. The "hunter" himself claimed that it could be the bones of a whale. In turn, many scientists found a resemblance to the skeleton of a crocodile, and the Maastricht church took the bones for the remains of a saint and took them to itself as a relic.

Scientist Georges Cuvier denied all these versions of the origin of the skeleton. After meticulous work, he suggested that the remains belong to an ancient reptile that lived in the waters of Holland millions of years ago. This was indicated by the large size of the skeleton, including the spine, a huge head and jaw with many sharp teeth, which testified to the predatory lifestyle of the creature. Cuvier also noticed the remains of ancient fish, molluscs and other aquatic life, which, apparently, this reptile ate.

The creature was named Mososaurus, which can be translated from Greek as "reptile of the river Meuse" (in French Meuse). This was the first serious scientific discovery of the scientist. Having made an analysis on the remains of an unknown creature, Georges Cuvier laid the foundation for a new science - paleontology.

How was the work with the remains

Georges Cuvier studied and systematized about forty species of various prehistoric animals. Some of them could only remotely resemble modern representatives of the fauna, but the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with cows, rams, deer.

Also, the scientist proved that before the world was a kingdom of reptiles. Water and land have become home to many different types of dinosaurs. Even the sky was dominated by pterodactyls, not birds, as other researchers believed.

Georges Cuvier developed his own way of studying the remains. As a result, based on the skeleton of the animal and the knowledge that all parts of the body are interconnected, he could guess what the creature actually looked like. As practice has shown, his work was very believable.

Georges Cuvier: Contribution to Biology

Continuing the study of animals, the scientist began to analyze the similarities and differences between them. As a result, he became the founder of such a trend in science as comparative anatomy. His theory of "the ratio of parts of the body" says that all organs and structures are interconnected, and their structure and functionality depend on environmental conditions, nutrition, reproduction.

An example is the analysis of a hoofed animal. It feeds on grass, which means it must have massive teeth. Since a powerful jaw requires highly developed muscles, the head will also be large in relation to the rest of the body. Such a head must be supported, which means that the vertebrae of the cervical spine and their processes will be developed. A herbivorous mammal, lacking fangs or claws, must somehow defend itself against predators. As a result, horns appeared. Plant food takes a long time to digest, which leads to the development of a voluminous stomach and long intestines. A developed digestive system is the reason for the presence of wide ribs and a large belly.

Further work in the field of paleontology led to the discovery of many unseen creatures. Among them are pterodactyls - flying reptiles that used to be predators and feed on fish. So Georges Cuvier proved that millions of years ago the sky was ruled by reptiles, not birds.

Catastrophe theory

Georges Cuvier, whose biography was associated with the development of paleontology, brought up his idea of the evolution of living organisms. Studying the remains of ancient creatures, the scientist noticed one pattern: in the surface layers of the earth's crust are the bones of animals that have at least the slightest resemblance to modern species, and in deeper layers there are skeletons of prehistoric creatures.

Despite this discovery, Georges Cuvier contradicted himself. The fact is that he denied evolution as a whole, as a result of which the scientist proposed his theory of the development of fauna on the planet. Cuvier suggested that at indefinite intervals of time, a piece of land was flooded by the sea, and all living organisms perished. After that, the water left, and in a new place other organisms arose with fundamentally new features of the structure of the organism. When asked where these animals could have appeared, scientists could only guess. Catastrophe theory is reactionary because its emergence was an attempt to reconcile science and religion.

Georges Cuvier's ideas about the evolution of fauna could have arisen due to the fact that at the time of the development of paleontology, transitional forms between individual animal species were not found. As a result, there was no reason to assume about the phased evolutionary development of organisms. Only Darwin proposed a similar theory, but this happened after the death of Georges Cuvier.

Differences between the classification of Linnaeus and Cuvier

Working with animals and studying their structure, Georges Cuvier briefly systematized all representatives of the fauna into 4 types:

1. Vertebrates. This included all animals with a dismembered skeleton. Examples: birds, reptiles (reptiles and amphibians), mammals, fish.

2. Radiant. In this combined group, all representatives of the fauna were collected, which had the radial symmetry of the body, which is characteristic, for example, of a starfish.

3. Soft-bodied. These are animals with a soft body enclosed in a hard shell. These include cuttlefish, mussels, oysters, grape snails, pond snails, octopuses, etc.

4. Arthropods. Animals belonging to this group have a powerful external skeleton in the form of a hard shell, and the entire body is divided into many segments. Examples: centipedes, insects, crustaceans, arachnids. Some worms were also mistakenly included here.

Linnaeus, unlike Georges Cuvier, identified 6 such types: reptiles, birds, mammals, fish, insects and worms (here amphibians also belong to reptiles). From the point of view of systematics, Cuvier's classification of animals turned out to be more perfect, and therefore it was used for a long time.

One day a student of Cuvier decided to play a trick on him. To do this, he put on a ram costume and, while the teacher was sleeping, quietly walked over to his bed. He exclaimed: "Cuvier, Cuvier, I'll eat you!" Georges felt the horns through his sleep and saw the hooves, after which he calmly replied: "You are not a predator, you will not be able to eat me."

There is also a quote from Cuvier that all organs and body parts of an animal are interconnected. It says that “the organism is a coherent whole. Individual parts of it cannot be changed without causing others to change. "

Achievements

Georges Cuvier was considered an outstanding scientist in the field of paleontology of that time. A short biography says that in 1794 the scientist worked in the new museum of natural history. There he wrote the first works on entomology, which became the beginning of serious scientific activity.

In 1995, Cuvier began living in Paris. A year later, he took up the chair of animal anatomy at the Sorbonne and was appointed a member of the national institute. A couple of years later, the scientist became the head of the Department of Comparative Anatomy of the same University of Paris.

For his scientific achievements, Georges Cuvier received the title of Peerage of France and became a member of the French Academy.

Conclusion

Cuvier made an enormous contribution to the development of comparative anatomy and paleontology. His work became the foundation for further study of animals, and his classification remained for a long time. And although he left a number of errors in the field of evolution, the scientist is worthy of praise and recognition for his numerous works.

Georges Cuvier

Cuvier Georges (1769-1832), French zoologist, one of the reformers of comparative anatomy, paleontology and systematics of animals, foreign honorary member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1802). He introduced the concept of type in zoology. He established the principle of "organ correlation", on the basis of which he reconstructed the structure of many extinct animals. He did not recognize the variability of species, explaining the change in fossil faunas of the so-called. theory of catastrophes.

Cuvier, Georges (1769-1832) - French naturalist. His main works are in the field of zoology, comparative anatomy, paleontology. Formulated the law of correlation (ratio) of parts of the body. K. extended this law not only to morphological (the law of subordination of organs), but also to physiological connections (the law of subordination of functions - organic correlation). Applying the law of correlation, K. recreated a number of extinct animals from their fossil remains, and thereby laid the foundations of scientific paleontology.

Philosophical dictionary / author-comp. S. Ya. Podoprigora, A. S. Podoprigora. - Ed. 2nd, erased. - Rostov n / a: Phoenix, 2013, p. 183.

Cuvier Georges (1769-1832) - French naturalist, founder of comparative anatomy and paleontology. On the basis of studies of fossil organisms, he came to the conclusion about the gradual improvement of their structure as the transition from ancient layers to new ones. However, being a supporter creationism, explained the qualitative differences in geological layers on the basis of the "catastrophe theory", according to which geological upheavals took place in the history of the Earth, as a result of which whole fauna and flora perished and new ones, higher in organization, appeared without direct connection with previous forms of living. Although Cuvier's works contributed to the preparation of evolutionary theory, he decisively refuted the views of the early evolutionists - Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who did not yet have the necessary data to substantiate the idea of the evolution of organisms.

Philosophical Dictionary. Ed. I.T. Frolov. M., 1991, p. 213.

Georges Leopold Christian Dagobert Cuvier was born on 23 August 1769 in the Alsatian town of Montbéliard. Cuvier's father was a retired French army officer.

At first Cuvier studied at school, then at the age of fifteen he entered the Karolinska Academy in Stuttgart, where he chose the faculty of cameral sciences. Here he studied law, finance, hygiene and agriculture. Four years later, Cuvier graduated from the university and returned home. In 1788, Cuvier left for Normandy to the estate of the Count of Erisi, where he became his son's housekeeper. The estate was on the seashore, and Cuvier saw marine animals for the first time. He studied the internal structure of fish, crabs, soft-bodied, sea stars, worms. He described the results of the research in detail in the journal "Zoological Bulletin".

When Cuvier's service ended in 1794. Scientists from Paris invited Cuvier to work at the newly established Museum of Natural History.

In the spring of 1795, Cuvier came to Paris. In the same year, he took the department of animal anatomy at the University of Paris - Sorbonne.

In 1796 Cuvier was appointed a member of the national institute, in 1800 he took the chair of natural history at the College de France. In 1802 he took up the chair of comparative anatomy at the Sorbonne.

The first scientific works of Cuvier were devoted to entomology. Cuvier became convinced that the adopted Linnaeus system does not strictly correspond to reality. Cuvier believed that in the animal world there are four types of body structure, completely dissimilar to each other. Animals of one type are dressed with a hard shell, and their body consists of many segments. Cuvier called these animals "articulated". In another type, the soft body of the animal is enclosed in a hard shell and they have no signs of articulation: snails, octopuses, oysters - these animals Cuvier called "soft-bodied". Animals of the third type have a dismembered internal bone skeleton - these are "vertebrates". Animals of the fourth type are built in the same way as a starfish, that is, their body parts are located along radii that diverge from one center. Cuvier called these animals "radiant".

Within each type, Cuvier identified classes; some of them coincided with the classes of Linnaeus. So, for example, the type of vertebrates was divided into classes of mammals, birds, reptiles and fish. Cuvier laid his system as the basis for the major three-volume work "The Kingdom of Animals", where the anatomical structure of animals was described in detail.

Cuvier became convinced that all the organs of the animal are closely related to each other, that each organ is needed for the life of the whole organism. Each animal is adapted to the environment in which it lives, finds food, hides from enemies, takes care of the offspring. By studying fossil remains, Cuvier restored the appearance of many extinct animals. He proved that once on the site of Europe there was a warm sea, on which huge predators swam - ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, etc. And reptiles dominated the air. The wing of a flying lizard was a leathery membrane stretched between the animal's body and the very elongated little finger of its forelimb. Cuvier called them pterodactyls, that is, "finger-wings". Cuvier became convinced that in the past there was an era with a peculiar animal world, in which not a single modern animal existed. All the animals that lived then died out. Cuvier discovered and described about forty extinct breeds of large mammals - pachyderms and ruminants. Cuvier discovered that fossil fauna are found in the layers of the earth's crust in a known order. Older strata contain the remains of marine fish and reptiles; in later - other reptiles and the first small and rare mammals with a very primitive skull structure; even later - the fauna of ancient mammals and birds. In sediments preceding modern ones, Cuvier discovered the remains of a mammoth, a cave bear, and a woolly rhinoceros. Despite his own discoveries, Cuvier maintained the old point of view about the constancy of species. He pointed to the sudden disappearance of the faunas and the lack of communication between them. To explain the successive succession of fossil animals, Cuvier came up with a special theory of "coups" or "catastrophes" in the history of the Earth.

The theory of "catastrophes" dominated science for a long time, and only the evolutionary doctrine of Darwin refuted it.

Cuvier paved new ways of research in biology and created new areas of knowledge - paleontology and comparative anatomy of animals.

The scientist's merits were noted at home: he was elected a member of the French Academy, under Louis Philippe, he became the peer of France.

Cuvier died in 1832.

Reprinted from the site http://100top.ru/encyclopedia/

Childhood of a scientist

Education

Georges Cuvier - biography of a scientist at the crossroads of life's path

The first research in the field of paleontology

The creature was named Mososaurus, which can be translated from Greek as "reptile of the river Meuse" (in French Meuse). This was the first serious scientific discovery of the scientist. Having made an analysis on the remains of Georges Cuvier, he laid the foundation for a new science - paleontology.

How was the work with the remains

Georges Cuvier studied and systematized about forty different species. Some of them could only remotely resemble modern representatives of the fauna, but the overwhelming majority had nothing to do with cows, rams, deer.

Georges Cuvier developed his own way of studying the remains. As a result, based on the knowledge that all parts of the body are interconnected, he could guess what the creature actually looked like. As practice has shown, his work was very believable.

Georges Cuvier: Contribution to Biology

Catastrophe theory

Differences between the classification of Linnaeus and Cuvier

Working with animals and studying their structure, Georges Cuvier briefly systematized all representatives of the fauna into 4 types:

1. Vertebrates. This included all animals with a dismembered skeleton. Examples: birds, reptiles (reptiles and amphibians), mammals, fish.

2. Radiant. In this combined group were collected all the representatives of the fauna that possessed a body that is characteristic, for example, of a starfish.

3. Soft-bodied. These are animals with a soft body enclosed in a hard shell. These include cuttlefish, mussels, oysters, pond snails, octopuses, etc.

Linnaeus, unlike Georges Cuvier, identified 6 such types: reptiles, birds, mammals, fish, insects and worms (here amphibians also belong to reptiles). From the point of view of animals, Cuvier turned out to be more perfect, and therefore it was used for a long time.

Achievements

Georges Cuvier was considered an outstanding scientist in the field of paleontology of that time. A short biography says that in 1794 the scientist worked in a new museum. There he wrote the first works on entomology, which became the beginning of serious scientific activity.

In 1795, Cuvier began living in Paris. A year later, he took up the chair of animal anatomy at the Sorbonne and was appointed a member of the national institute. A couple of years later, the scientist became the head of the Department of Comparative Anatomy of the same University of Paris.

For his scientific achievements, Georges Cuvier received the title of Peerage of France and became a member of the French Academy.

Conclusion

Cuvier Georges - French naturalist, known for his works in the field of comparative anatomy of paleontology and animal taxonomy, a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences (since 1795). Born in Montbéliard (Alsace). After graduating from the Karolinska Academy in Stuttgart, for a number of years he was a home teacher in Normandy. At the same time he studied marine animals. In 1792 he wrote his first work - "Anatomy of the patella mollusk", which was highly appreciated by the famous French scientist E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who invited J. Cuvier to Paris. From 1794 until the end of his life, J. Cuvier was engaged in scientific and pedagogical activities in Paris. Openly calling for reconciliation with any government, J. Cuvier during the empire of Napoleon I was an extraordinary imperial commissar and member of the Council of State, after the Restoration - a peer of France, a member of the Council of State and a royal commissioner.

Cuvier's research was based on the principle of "correlation of body parts" he applied, according to this principle, each form of an animal organism is a closed system, the parts of which are mutually consistent both in relation to their structure (the law of subordination of organs), and in relation to their function (the law subordination of functions - organic correlations). A change in one part inevitably entails a corresponding change in another part of the organism. This makes it possible, on the basis of familiarity with one part, to judge the whole organism. The principle of correlation of parts by J. Cuvier was of a purely teleological nature. Cuvier believed that the creator of all beings (that is, God), creating all living things, could be guided by only one law - the need to give each of his creations the means to maintain existence. Thus, J. Cuvier considered the principle of finite causes to be the only basis on which the natural sciences can rely, and he considered the organism's adaptability to the environment from an idealistic standpoint. The comparative anatomical method developed by J. Cuvier played a very positive role in science. Having traced the changes and ratios of organs in all sections of the animal kingdom, he simultaneously established the concept of types in zoology and for the first time combined four classes into one type of vertebrates: mammals, birds, amphibians and fish. Cuvier attributed other animals to the other three types - articulated, soft-bodied, radiant. He based the classification on the structure of the nervous system, as the most important system of the body that controls all its functions. Further classification was carried out by Cuvier according to characteristics of secondary importance. The principle of organ correlation made it possible for J. Cuvier to reconstruct entire fossil organisms from the few parts found during excavations. Cuvier described new forms of fossil reptiles, birds, fish and mammals and, most importantly, established a connection between the fossil forms and the layers of the earth's crust in which they were found. He showed that in the transition from ancient strata of the earth to geologically younger ones, fossil forms become more complex in their structure. In the most ancient layers, fossils are completely absent. All these data, obtained by J. Cuvier, laid the foundation for the evolutionary theory. However, the theoretical views of J. Cuvier were in sharp contradiction with the facts obtained. In contrast to K.M.Bair, he did not recognize the kinship and community of origin of animals within the types established by him. Species were recognized by him as constant and unchanging categories of living nature. The metaphysical approach to the phenomena of living nature prevented Cuvier from understanding the true essence of correlative variability, which led him to significant errors in the reconstruction of fossil forms. The limited methodology of J. Cuvier was especially clearly reflected in the study of modern or fossil intermediate forms of the animal kingdom.

Trying to bring the discoveries made in accordance with his metaphysical ideas, J. Cuvier put forward the theory of catastrophes, or cataclysms, which was supposed to prove the lack of continuity between successive forms of life. The essence of this theory is reduced to the assumption of grandiose catastrophes in a significant part of the globe, during which, according to J. Cuvier, the entire organic world was destroyed, after which new forms appeared. J. Cuvier completely rejected both the contemporary doctrine of J. Lamarck about the variability of living nature and the position of E. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire on the unity of the organization of animals.

The indisputable merit of J. Cuvier is the creation of an accurate research method and the accumulation of a huge amount of factual material.

Bibliography

Biographical Dictionary of Scientists and Technicians. T. 1. - Moscow: State. scientific publishing house "Great Soviet Encyclopedia", 1958. - 548 p.