Georges louis leclerc biography

Georges-louis leclerc comte de buffon contribution to evolution

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Comte de Buffon

Georges Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, 7 September April , French naturalist.

Buffon, born George-Louis LeClerc (the name Buffon was inherited with an from his mother when he was twenty-five), was born in Montbard, France, the son of a Burgundian state official, and attended the Jesuit College of Godrans in Dijon. In he followed his father's advice and began to study law, but in he went to Angers to study mathematics, medicine, and botany. In the early s, Buffon traveled with his friend, the Duke of Kingston, and during their stay in England, Buffon was elected a member of the Royal Society.

Shortly thereafter he was recalled to France, where he pursued research in probability and botany, and published translations of Stephen Hales's Vegetable Staticks () and Isaac Newton's Fluxions ().

Buffon was appointed keeper of the French Jardin du Roi (now the Jardin des Plantes) in , an impressive royal post for someone only thirty-two years old. His patron, J.-F.-P

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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon ()

Sometimes it is hard to imagine how revolutionary an idea was, especially when that idea is currently accepted as common knowledge. Many such ideas appear simple and are often taught at the elementary school level, yet the simplicity of these ideas belies the complexity involved in their origins.

During the eighteenth century, two church doctrines provided sweeping biblical explanations for most questions about biological diversity: Separate Creation, the idea that all creatures have been created independently of one another by God and organized into a hierarchy ("chain of being") with Man occupying the most elevated rank beneath God; and the 6, year limit on the age of the planet.

It is not the average person who questions two thousand years of dogma, but that is what Buffon did: years before Darwin, Buffon, in his Historie Naturelle, a 44 volume encyclopedia describing everything known about the natural world, wrestled with the sim

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Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon

French naturalist (–)

For other people named Buffon, see Buffon (disambiguation).

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte dem Buffon (French:[ʒɔʁʒlwiləklɛʁkɔ̃tdəbyfɔ̃]; 7 September – 16 April ) was a French naturalist, mathematician, and cosmologist. He held the position of intendant (director) at the Jardin ni Roi, now called the Jardin des plantes.

Buffon's works influenced the next two generations of naturalists, including two prominent French scientists Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier. Buffon published thirty-six quarto volumes of his Histoire Naturelle during his lifetime, with additional volumes based on his notes and further research being published in the two decades following his death.^[1]

Ernst Mayr wrote that "Truly, Buffon was the father of all thought in natural history in the second half of the 18th century".^[2] Credited with being one of the first naturalists to recognize ecological succes