Embryogeny and Phylogeny of the Human Posture 1 A New Glance at the Future of our Species

Preface xi

Part 1. The Vertical Human: Philosopher of Nature 1

Chapter 1. Anthropos, the First of the Animals 3

1.1. Introduction 3

1.1.1. Epistemology according to Georges Cuvier 5

1.1.2. From the metaphysics of beings to the physics of their matter 7

1.1.3. Mathematics, forms and women physicians 10

1.1.4. Socrates, Plato and Aristotle: an anthropology of ideas or a certain idea of anthropology 13

1.2. Anthropos, the axis of the world 16

1.2.1. Man, a vertical anatomy 16

1.2.2. Apes and humans 17

1.2.3. The generation of anthropos: the father as a model, the mother by default 20

Chapter 2. From Aristotle to the 16th Century: The Eclipse of Science 27

2.1. Introduction 27

2.2. Comparative anatomy of apes and humans from Aristotle to Galen 27

2.2.1. The Museum of Alexandria 27

2.3. Decadence and rebirth of natural philosophy and human anatomy 31

2.3.1. Albertus Magnus, the Aristotle of a reborn Europe 31

2.3.2. The first lay schools of medicine in Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries 33

2.3.3. Instant of grace: Leonardo da Vinci, from the elusive movement to the restitution of the soul 39

Chapter 3. The 16th Century: From Generation to Human Physiology 53

3.1. Ambroise Paré (1510–1590), father of French surgery with “more than barbaric Latin” 53

3.2. André Vésale (1514–1564), the audacity of objectivity in the face of Galen’s anthropo-simian chimeras 55

3.3. Jacobus Sylvius (1478–1555): defending Galen body and soul 56

3.4. Gabriele Fallope (1523–1562): freedom of dissection, the fine anatomy of the ear and cranial base 59

3.5. Bartolomeo Eustachi (Bartholomaeus Eustachius, c. 1523–1562): the human fetus and the monkey 60

3.6. The embryo, the fetus and blood circulation with the maternal body 62

3.6.1. Arantius (1530–1589): the development of the human fetus 62

3.6.2. D’Aquapendente (1533–1619): the father of embryology 62

3.6.3. William Harvey (1578–1657): the demonstration of blood circulation, vital for the development of the embryo 63

3.7. On human generation and fetal development 64

3.7.1. Gabriel de Zerbis (1455–1505) 65

3.7.2. Volcher Coiter (1534–1576) 65

3.7.3. Félix Platter (Foelix Platerus, 1536–1614), the first optician 66

3.8. Giovanni Alfonso Borelli (1608–1679): the dynamic geometry of the vertical body 67

Chapter 4. Centuries in Search of Light 69

4.1. Independent Academies of Sciences 69

4.1.1. Gerolamo Cardano: of the necessity and the form of Man, by spontaneous generation or by putrefaction? 71

4.1.2. Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619), “Prince of the libertines” 75

4.1.3. Man absent from himself, God always as explanation 77

4.2. The beginning of Man and Russian dolls 77

4.2.1. From microscope to microcosm 77

4.2.2. The created species are not immortal 81

Chapter 5. The Century of Naturalistic Enlightenment 85

5.1. The Jardin royal des plantes: a new natural history of animals 85

5.1.1. Georges Leclerc, Count of Buffon 85

5.1.2. A research organization independent of biblical dogmatism 87

5.1.3. The history of the Earth as a premise of the natural history of Man 90

5.1.4. Man is the last “internal mold” created on the Earth 95

5.1.5. The species according to Buffon 100

5.1.6. A fundamental principle: the subordination of external parties to internal parties 105

Part 2. The Place of Humans among Current and Fossilized Primates 107

Chapter 6. From Natural Curiosity Cabinets to the First Primate Collections 109

6.1. Introduction 109

6.1.1. Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), the first great collector of natural curiosities 109

6.1.2. Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), the first natural history museums in Europe 111

6.1.3. Jacobus Bontius (Jacob de Bondt, 1592–1631): the first wild great ape or “Man of the Woods” 112

6.1.4. Tulpius (1593–1674), the first description of a chimpanzee 112

6.1.5. Edward Tyson (1650–1708), the first dissection of a chimpanzee 113

6.1.6. Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), the classification of organisms by species and genera 116

6.2. Comparative anatomy at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle 118

6.2.1. Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton (1716–1799), the occipital hole and the face unified by geometry 118

6.2.2. Georges Buffon publishes his own “Nomenclature of Apes” 122

6.2.3. Petrus Camper (1722–1789), the first dissection of an orangutan: the ape does not speak 124

6.2.4. The premises of a gradualist and racial anthropology 125

Chapter 7. The Transition from the 18th to the 19th Century: Birth of Paleontology and Comparative Anatomy 127

7.1. Oryctography or the study of the disposition of minerals and fossils in the soil 127

7.1.1. François-Xavier de Burtin (1743–1818), a leading European collector 127

7.1.2. The French Revolution: naturalist audacity faced with the fury of the Terror (1792–1794) 128

7.1.3. The premises of the Industrial Revolution: energy and thermodynamics 131

7.2. Georges Cuvier (1769–1832), the French Revolution and the revolution of the globe 134

7.2.1. The natural sciences at the heart of the “Terror” 134

7.2.2. Karl Kielmeyer, Georges Cuvier’s great comrade and gifted youngster 137

7.2.3. Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the unity of the animal composition plan 138

7.2.4. The laws of animal oeconomy 139

7.2.5. Humans have no fossil ancestor according to Cuvier 141

7.2.6. The division between Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire or the distinction between micro- and macroevolution 144

Chapter 8. The Slow Recognition of Humans’ Simian Origins 147

8.1. Introduction 147

8.2. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck or the audacity of the transformist theory of organization plans 148

8.2.1. “The causes of the main physical facts” or “what is life” (1780) 148

8.2.2. Transformism or the first formulation of evolution 150

8.2.3. Lamarck and the first theory of the common origins of the orangutan, the chimpanzee and Homo sapiens 153

8.2.4. The anatomical origins of Homo sapiens, a break with his own statements 154

8.2.5. Which system to classify humans: the separation of organizational plans or the variety of a single plan? 155

Chapter 9. Embryology, Fixist Anthropology and the Neanderthal Man 159

9.1. Introduction 159

9.1.1. The theory of epigenesis (Wolff 1759) 160

9.1.2. Karl von Baer discovers the formation of the ovum (1827) 160

9.1.3. Johann Meckel (1781–1833), the revolution of the 11 laws of embryogenesis 161

9.2. The origins of the vertical anatomy of humans: between poetic metaphysics, transcendental finality and climatic influences 164

9.3. Great confusion between Linnaean nesting classification and the emergence of organizational plans 166

9.3.1. Étienne Serres (1786–1868) and the “transcendental” anatomy of the embryo (1832) 166

9.3.2. Alfred Velpeau (1795–1867) and the cranio-caudal gradient of embryogenesis (1832) 168

9.3.3. The first Chair of Embryogeny at the Collège de France (1844) 170

9.3.4. The discovery of the gorilla, 1847–1852 171

9.3.5. Franz Fick (1813–1858), a giant step forward: the study of the internal base of the skull (1853–1862) 172

9.3.6. Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), a major study on the relations between the internal base and the external face 174

9.3.7. Neanderthal Man (1856), a lost human species 175

9.3.8. Herman Welcker (1822–1897), comparative internal growth of the orangutan and Homo sapiens (1862) 175

Chapter 10. The Decline of Transformism at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle 177

10.1. The decline of transformism despite the discovery of the first monkey fossils 177

10.1.1. First manmade objects contemporary to Diluvium, 1842 178

10.1.2. Edouard Lartet: the first great fossil monkey to the rescue of Cuvier (1856) 179

10.1.3. Paris, capital of transformist anthropology and free thought (1848–1857) 180

10.2. A theory lacking internal coherence 182

10.2.1. Gradualist classification and discontinuities between fossil genera: an impasse 182

10.2.2. Charles Darwin (1809–1882) knocked at the door of the French Academy of Sciences and convinced no one 184

10.2.3. A progression toward scientific formalization of the evolution of structures: the geometrical study of the skull 188

10.2.4. The cart before the horse: the Linnaean classification of fossils before understanding of processes 190

10.2.5. The transmission of acquired characteristics and Charles Darwin’s gemmules 194

10.2.6. The faults of Charles Darwin against Armand de Quatrefages 197

Chapter 11. Transformist Paleontology Inaugurates the 20th Century 203

11.1. The rebirth 203

11.1.1. Albert Gaudry (1827–1908), a palace in the Jardin des plantes for paleontology and comparative anatomy 203

11.1.2. Paul Gervais (1816–1879) at the Chair of Anatomy and the first bipedal fossil monkey 204

11.1.3. Haeckel (1834–1919), on the way to formalizing processes 205

11.1.4. Haeckel, a new hope 207

11.1.5. Phylogenesis and embryogenesis, a reversed logic 209

11.2. Natural selection and the scale of human societies 211

References 215

Index 227

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