Georges Cuvier

"Georges Cuvier was a great naturalist from the beginning of the 19th century, so right around 1800, and he was the first person to really say organisms go extinct...And Georges Cuvier came along and said, you know, really, essentially, if they’re out there, we would have seen them. We haven’t seen them: They’re gone. And he posited this whole lost world, which he then proceeded to start to uncover. So a lot of the animal names that we have now—for example, pterodactyl—he came up with. He was the first person to identify a pterodactyl. And his theory was that animals only went extinct in these catastrophic waves—you know, something happened, the planet changed; otherwise, why else would they go extinct? And then a naturalist named Charles Lyell, who was Charles Darwin’s mentor, came along, and he said, “That’s ridiculous. You know, we never see these catastrophes. They don’t happen. Only—the only way the Earth changes is very, very, very gradually, and things go extinct very gradually, and the world changes very gradually.” And that became sort of the doctrine for a very long time, over a hundred years, until the Alvarezes came along and identified an asteroid impact as the event that had done in the dinosaurs—and many other creatures, I should say."

"Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe."

"It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary information to solve some of them."

"To spread healthy ideas among even the lowest classes of people, to remove men from the influence of prejudice and passion, to make reason the arbiter and supreme guide of public opinion; that is the essential goal of the sciences; that is how science will contribute to the advancement of civilization, and that is what deserves protection of governments who want to insure the stability of their power."

"The works which this man leaves behind him occupy a few pages only; their importance is not greatly superior to their extent."

"The natural food of man, judging from his structure, appears to consist of the fruits, roots, and other succulent parts of vegetables."

"The synthesis of paleontology, taxonomy, and comparative anatomy that Cuvier achieved was based on a teleological approach to nature, one that gave primacy to functional purpose over structural affinity."

"Cuvier advanced his doctrine on methodological as well as scientific grounds. Although his work was far from empirical, Cuvier adopted and promulgated an empiricist ideology in order to combat opposing points of view."

"Linnaeus and Cuvier have been my two gods, though in very different ways, but they were mere school-boys to old Aristotle."

"Schwester, ich war es, der entdeckt hat, dass die Egel rotes Blut haben […] Es ist wunderbar, wenn man sieht, dass die, die man liebt, noch schlucken können."