The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

became ducks. Moles, having moved underground, stopped using their
sight, and so over generations their eyes became small and weak.
Lamarck, for his part, adamantly opposed Cuvier’s idea of extinction;
there was no process he could imagine capable of wiping an organism out
entirely. (Interestingly, the only exception he entertained was humanity,
which, Lamarck allowed, might be able to exterminate certain large and
slow-to-reproduce animals.) What Cuvier interpreted as espèces perdues
Lamarck claimed were simply those that had been most completely
transformed.
The notion that animals could change their body types when
convenient Cuvier found absurd. He lampooned the idea that “ducks by
dint of diving became pikes; pikes by dint of happening upon dry land
changed into ducks; hens searching for their food at the water’s edge, and
striving not to get their thighs wet, succeeded so well in elongating their
legs that they became herons or storks.” He discovered what was, to his
mind at least, definitive proof against transformisme in a collection of
mummies.
When Napoleon had invaded Egypt, the French had, as usual, seized
whatever interested them. Among the crates of loot shipped back to Paris
was an embalmed cat. Cuvier examined the mummy, looking for signs of
transformation. He found none. The ancient Egyptian cat was,
anatomically speaking, indistinguishable from a Parisian alley cat. This
proved that species were fixed. Lamarck objected that the few thousand
years that had elapsed since the Egyptian cat had been embalmed
represented “an infinitely small duration” relative to the vastness of time.
“I know that some naturalists rely a lot on the thousands of centuries
that they pile up with a stroke of the pen,” Cuvier responded dismissively.
Eventually, Cuvier would be called upon to compose a eulogy for
Lamarck, which he did very much in the spirit of burying rather than
praising. Lamarck, according to Cuvier, was a fantasist. Like the
“enchanted palaces of our old romances,” his theories were built on
“imaginary foundations,” so that while they might “amuse the