Throughout the early 19th century, the question of whether animals could transform into new species was controversial in the scientific community.
In 1798, Napoleon Bonaparte brought in a large group of academics – geologists, engineers and other scientists – in an unsuccessful attempt to take over Egypt. The animal mummies brought back from Egypt by scholars appear to be key to the problem of species transition.
Naturalists Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, colleagues from the French Museum of Natural History, represented both sides of the debate.
Cuvier mocked Lamarck in his obituary.
In 1832, a mocking eulogy was read in front of the French Academy of Sciences. Lamarck, the winner, and Cuvier, the author of the obituary, both died.
When one recognizes the death of one of Cuvier's colleagues, it is necessary both to praise their "useful works" and to call attention to the "more dubious" ideas that arise from "vivid imagination".
In this context, Cuvier attacked Lamarck's transformationist theory. Lamarck believes that after a long time, the simplest animals become more complex and transform into completely new species. This is nonsense for Cuvier, who believes that species never change.
When naturalists Guvier and Lamarck first met thirty years ago, a toki mummy came to the museum.
The indistinguishability of this ancient bird from the modern one seems to prove that Cuvier was right.
What is Transformationism?
In his elegy, Cuvier ridiculed Lamarck's claim that the "desire" to swim would make a waterbird's feet grow out of a net, or make the legs of another species that did not like to get wet longer.
This is almost 60 years after Charles Darwin published his theory of natural selection. At the time, some of the biggest questions in natural history were about why animals became extinct, while new ones emerged after huge gaps in the fossil record.
Perhaps the most well-known Lamarck is that the giraffe's long neck is obtained by stretching the leaves and passing on this property to its offspring. This is not an entirely new idea, but Lamarck uniquely says that this behavior can lead to a new species over time.
Species, he wrote, are a convenient way for humans to catalog living things. Since animals are constantly changing, a species is only a temporary category.
Cuvier, one of the founders of comparative anatomy, had a different view. Species are permanent. But he cannot deny that in the fossil record, every once in a while, new types of animals appear that have never existed before.
Cuvier believed that every once in a while, a natural disaster would lead to a new "era". Some species are extinct; Some popped up. If Lamarck is right, Cuvier says, then there will be all sorts of intermediates between fossils, between one species and another.
Geoffroy found mummies in Egypt.
Mummified animals thousands of years ago seem to be the perfect entry point to find evidence of changes between ancient animals and their descendants.
Among Napoleon's scholars was Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a naturalist who dissected every mongoose, fox, crocodile and lungfish he could find.
Zoologists are keen to collect animals, both alive and dead. When he came to the ruins, he saw his first mummy: ancient birds stacked in the cellar like wine bottles.
The ancient Egyptians revered many animals, including the ibis. To protect the birds, they treated them with dry salt and poured oil and resin on the remains, then wrapped them and put them in pots.
When Geoffroy returned from Egypt, he brought with him some wrapped ibises, cats, jackals, crocodiles, and other animals. Cuvier was in a hurry to check them. The mummification process went very smoothly, and even some of the "tiniest hairs" were intact.
When Cuvier compared the bones of the long-dead crested ibis to modern birds, they were very similar.
Lamarck agrees. But these mummies are only 3,000 years old. In a presentation to students, Lamarck said that no one knew how old the planet was at the time, but in the master plan for the planet, thousands of years were "infinitesimally small."
He later wrote that it would be strange to see a new species in just a few thousand years, "because the location and climate of Egypt are still very similar to those of that time." He believes that it takes time and unique circumstances to produce a new species.
Cuvier argues, however, that his belief in the unchanging nature of species is confirmed. "I have proven that it is now exactly the same as it was in the days of the pharaohs," he later wrote of the mummies. Time and climate are not enough to significantly alter this species.
He was wrong, just as Lamarck's view of the mechanism of heredity was incorrect.
Darwin's predecessor.
Despite Cuvier's reputation, the evidence from mummies is not sufficient to quell the controversy over the theory of transformation.
With the publication of Charles Darwin's Treatise.