Evolving Thoughts

In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).

Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect manner was, of course, human form, and in particular French form.

Robinet is one of those mythical, and on inspection, faux, precursors to Darwin. One site says of him

Jean Baptiste Robinet (1735-1820) fully anticipated Darwin on the gradual accumulation of beneficial adaptions to produce new species from pre-existing ones. Robinet wrote almost a complete synthesis of Darwin's basic theory years before Darwin's birth:

"Each generation introduces some differences and these differences endlessly multiplied and accumulated produce significant alterations in the prototype; these differences suppress old parts or multiply them, engender new ones, transform the combinations, vary the results, and finally produce something very different from the model itself." Robinet, Vue Philosophique (1766); De la Nature (1768)

Nothing could be more wrong. Robinet held that the world already had everything it could have (the principle of plenitude) and that the marche (internal function) of life was such that it produced each of these variations. He claimed that there were no species in the naturalist's sense, only individuals (a view later adopted by Lamarck when he did make the marche a temporal sequence).

In his Considérations philosophiques de la gradation naturelle des formes de l'être (1768), Robinet had woodcuts of all kinds of rocks, fossils and plants that were like parts of humans, including the penis, scrotum, vagina and testicles. As well, he seemed to have a real fixation on half-human, half-fish forms of mermen and mermaids, which he quoted extensively from travellers' tales to prove the existence of. Some of these are clearly manatees (and he has a nice image of one, next to a traditional human female upper torso mermaid). He also has one of the earliest woodcuts of chimps.

Trémaux is equally odd in his own way (it's a law of idiosyncrasy: all weirdos are unique). He was an anthropologist who rejected the Darwinian form of evolution in favour of the older French idea of the influence of locales on form. He wrote that what made species stable (fixité) was "the same ground" (sol) and that this was true also of human races as it was of chimpanzees and gorillas.

Trémaux's ideas were influential for a while, largely because he pioneered the use of photography in field anthropology and his works were regarded as art as well as science. For a while, Marx flirted with the geographical determinism on a plastic biology of Trémaux, although he later retreated somewhat.

That is our gallery of strange authors for today...