Every botanist, zoologist, and naturalist, from the late Eighteenth Century through the Nineteenth Century would be hugely impacted by the Systema Naturae (and certainly these could only dream of achieving its commercial success). But there is a great irony in Linnaeus’ achievement. Linnaeus would, in his later years, express to close friends his sincere doubts as to the “natural” basis of his system. Perhaps, in its elegant mapping out of creation, it brought into sharper relief both its own artifice and the implicit relatedness of things—that “transmutation of organic substance” that later naturalists like Lamark, Wallace and Darwin would observe and describe so astutely.
Many 19th century, religious naturalists, confronted with the growing fossil evidence of creatures no longer living (in Europe and in the “young” America of the New World), would insist that such “extinctions” were local only; that all species that ever lived surely continued to live elsewhere—if at a great remove from civilized European society. And the more obvious facts of animal husbandry and breeding practices, forced believers in Special Creation to admit a certain “plasticity” in specific forms, but only to a limited degree; a species was primary; its general form was rigid.
Some theologically inclined naturalists (and many such-minded folk existed then) would come to assert a geologic theory known as catastrophism to resolve the observed discrepancies in Nature (the disappearance of flora and fauna) with this venerable conception of Nature. Catastrophism—the idea that massive, global events like earthquakes and floods accounted for all the “discontinuities” in Nature–was perhaps an early 19th Century way of saying: “S**t happens!” It permitted mass extinctions as cycles of creation within Creation. It was thus also a form of supernaturalism; these catastrophic forces acted upon nature (via God’s intervening will) just a much as any “natural” (“self-governing”) geologic force could be said to, without any greater proof to the contrary—and they can all take place within the Biblically confirmed few millennia. In the “culture wars” of that time, the catastrophists were frequently on the same side as the progressionists, for both placed severe limits on the age of the Earth, with the former accepting divine intervention in geologic history, and with the latter asserting the working through of Divine Design in Nature.
The geologist Charles Lyell—who in his early career denied evolutionary theories—believed in a continuous succession of forms, taking place over great ages, and which operated according to natural law. The theory came to be known as uniformitarianism and it permitted no room for any outside intervention. Perhaps as a reaction to the catastrophists’ beliefs, early proponents of this view (such as James Hutton) denied the existence of epochs of destruction/extinction and cycles of faunal recreation. It is only today, as modern paleontology has revealed the Permian and KT extinctions (amongst many others) that we can see the irony here of Darwin’s greatest intellectual influence—Charles Lyell—denying the existence of great extinctions in order to advance his theory of natural, successive change.
About Michael Ricciardi
