From natural history to the history of nature:

Kant and the theory of transformism

Abstract

Natural history was born among the authors of classical antiquity as an essentially descriptive science. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, the idea of an investigation of nature in its temporal development was not yet implied in this science. At the same time that Buffon published the essay On the Epochs of Nature, in which he elaborated a true “history of the Earth” from its emergence to the present time, the study of human races led Kant to propose another meaning for the term “history”: it should now mean “the natural investigation of the origin” of a certain object (in this case, of the human species). The fact that the human races are just varieties of a single species could not be understood except from this temporal perspective, according to which each of them would be the result of a particular and contingent development of certain characteristics contained in the original form of the species. The idea of such an investigation took him to imagine that this relationship between diversity and unity, disposed in this way in time, could perhaps ground not only a “history” of the varieties or, races, but also a “history” of all the different species existing on the planet. This is precisely the idea that underlies the theory popularized by Lamarck and Darwin, known as transformism.