Rheinberger H J
Max-Planck-Institut für Molekulare Genetik, Berlin.
Hist Philos Life Sci. 1990;12(2):203-23.
There is a longstanding and ongoing controversy about whether Buffon is to be regarded as a forerunner of evolutionism in the eighteenth century, or even as one of the founders of transformistic biology. There are good reasons to deny this claim. There are good reasons even to deny that the question which is going to be answered negatively is of particular importance. The present paper addresses the issue from a different angle. It analyzes the concept of time operative in the natural history writings of Buffon, and it delineates the articulation of the concepts of time, change, and history with its organizing impact on Buffon's discourse on earth and organisms. It is argued that although with his species concept Buffon tries to introduce the classical notion of a physical system into biology, in order to do so, he has to subvert it by an element of time. This guides him in considering various aspects of organic change, but by itself does not lead to a general perspective of transformation. On the other hand, in his Epoques de la nature, Buffon introduces a general law of geological change, thus arriving at something which could be called a physically intelligible history. The conquest of natural history by physics, in one and the same movement, leads to a subversion of physical geology by history, and prevents biology from becoming evolutionistic in the sense in which the nineteenth century understands this term.
关于布丰是否应被视为18世纪进化论的先驱，甚至是否应被视为转化生物学的创始人之一，一直存在着长期且持续的争议。有充分的理由否定这一说法。甚至有充分的理由否定那个将被否定回答的问题具有特别重要的意义。本文从一个不同的角度探讨这个问题。它分析了布丰自然史著作中起作用的时间概念，并勾勒出时间、变化和历史概念的阐述及其对布丰关于地球和生物的论述的组织性影响。有人认为，尽管布丰试图通过他的物种概念将物理系统的经典概念引入生物学，但为了做到这一点，他不得不通过时间要素对其进行颠覆。这引导他思考有机变化的各个方面，但就其本身而言，并没有导致一个关于转化的总体视角。另一方面，在他的《自然的时代》中，布丰引入了地质变化的一般规律，从而得出了某种可以被称为物理上可理解的历史的东西。物理学对自然史的征服，在同一过程中，导致历史对物理地质学的颠覆，并阻止生物学成为19世纪所理解的那种意义上的进化论。
