The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [120]
One of William Smith’s early geological maps, in his Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, showing the area around Bristol.
At the Swan Inn, on 5 January 1796, he wrote up his conclusions regarding the relationship between strata and fossils. His principal interest lay in the need to identify strata for engineering purposes. Indeed his book, published in 1814, was called Strata Identified by Organised Fossils. From the turn of the century Smith began to publish stratigraphic maps, first of local regions and then of the whole of England.
Smith’s observations raised a number of problems. If the fossils he had found at different levels had been created at different times and not, as was supposed, all at once, and moreover if some of the fossil animals were not now in existence, God must have changed His mind about retaining those animals which He had originally created but which were now extinct. Had God made the wrong number of types of organisms at the act of Creation? If so, were the extinct organisms God’s mistakes? Could God have made mistakes and could He do so again? These were profoundly disturbing questions.
Some of the answers to them were provided by Georges Cuvier, who in 1794 was Professor of Vertebrate Zoology at the Paris Natural History Museum, now amalgamated with Buffon’s zoo. Cuvier’s influence on the study of natural history was so pervasive that he became known as the ‘dictator of biology’.
Cuvier’s comparative anatomy technique derived the whole animal from a single bone by showing how the shape of the missing bits necessarily followed, from tooth to jaw, head, legs with claws, spine, balancing tail.
Major finds of mammoth remains had been made in the last years of the eighteenth century, and in 1799 Cuvier showed how he could use a limited number of bones to reconstruct the shape of the whole animal through his technique of relating each bone to its necessary adjuncts. Carnivores would all be recognised by their sharp teeth, with jaws adapted to the strenuous use of those teeth and a head structure capable of sustaining the jaw, as well as claws used for clutching the prey, good binocular eyesight for pursuit and capture, a spine carrying a body built for pursuit, a stomach and intestines capable of digesting meat, and so on. The technique was known as comparative anatomy.
He also incidentally noted that some parts of animals were so basic as to be common to all, but that environmental demands called for the specialised characteristics that differed from one type to another. Using a system based on anatomical difference, Cuvier divided all animals into four branches: vertebrates, molluscs, jointed and radiates. However, although he believed in the fixity of species, the branch system at least allowed the possibility of separate development over time in each branch. For the first time the principle of simultaneous creation was breached.
As for the matter of fossil animals which were now extinct, Cuvier himself confirmed the problem in the Paris Basin, at the limestone quarries of Montmartre, where he found dinosaur remains. The solution suggested itself to him in 1808 when, after digging at various locations in the Paris Basin, he noticed that many of the bones he found were in strata also occupied by fossil oysters and other forms of marine life. This evidence of ancient seas reminded him of the description of the flood in the Bible. Cuvier postulated that there must have been some form of catastrophic tidal wave, caused by rising land, which had wiped out certain animals and plants. This would account for their absence from the modern world.
There would have to have been two floods, the latter being that mentioned in the Bible. The first flood would have happened before the creation of man and would have destroyed the older forms of life. The biblical flood would then have come after