History of Scientific Understanding
When it was first described in the 1750s, the idea of extinction was threatening to those who held a belief in the Great Chain of Being, a theological position that did not allow for "missing links".
The possibility of extinction was not widely accepted before the 1800s. The devoted naturalist Carl Linnaeus, could "hardly entertain" the idea that humans could cause the extinction of a species. When parts of the world had not been thoroughly examined and charted, scientists could not rule out that animals found only in the fossil record were not simply "hiding" in unexplored regions of the Earth. Georges Cuvier is credited with establishing extinction as a fact in a 1796 lecture to the French Institute. Cuvier's observations of fossil bones convinced him that they did not originate in extant animals. This discovery was critical for the spread of uniformitarianism, and led to the first book publicizing the idea of evolution though Cuvier himself strongly opposed the theories of evolution advanced by Lamarck and others.
Read more about this topic: Extinction
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history and/or scientific:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)