Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz
1807-1873
Swiss-American Naturalist, Paleontologist and Glaciologist
Jean Louis Agassiz was one of the foremost natural scientists of his time. He was particularly well-known for his work with fossil fishes and for his advocacy of the idea of global ice ages. Although he accepted the idea that species could become extinct, he resisted the theory of evolution, believing instead in the divine creation of species.
Louis Agassiz, the son of a Swiss minister, was born in French Switzerland in 1807. Like many of his contemporaries, he attended universityin both Switzerland and Germany, graduating with a degree in medicine in 1830. After graduation he traveled to Paris to study comparative anatomy under Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), a versatile French scientist. Cuvier was impressed with Agassiz's work on fossil fish, and this approval helped to set the course of much of Agassiz's future work. Although Couvier died only six months after their first meeting, Agassiz always considered himself Couvier's intellectual heir and took it upon himself to defend Couvier's work for the rest of his life. Agassiz published his masterwork on fossil fishes by basing it, in part, on notes given to him by Couvier.
Jean Louis Agassiz. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission.)As a junior professor at the Lyceum of Neuchâtel, Agassiz became interested in signs that glaciers had once moved far below any existing glaciers. Traveling with his friend, Johann von Charpentier (1786-1855), Agassiz became convinced of the accuracy of Charpentier's hypothesis that deep ice had transported many materials from a great distance. Expanding on this theory, Agassiz realized that many of the surface features in England, Scotland, and much of Europe were consistent with the existence of continental glaciation, leading to a theory of ice ages that he propounded with great enthusiasm. Later, on a trip to North America, he expanded this theory to the New World, suggesting the existence of a global ice age in the recent geologic past. Although this theory met with a great degree of skepticism at first, it was later found to be accurate.
Agassiz moved to the United States in 1846, becoming a professor at Harvard University and starting the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In the United States, he was a great proponent of advancement of the sciences, urging the formation of what is now the National Academy of Sciences (of which he was a founding member). He also devoted a great deal of energy to raising funds for scientific research in the United States, attempting to raise the profile of the sciences in his adopted country.
In spite of his research in the evolution of fossil fishes, Agassiz remained a staunch opponent of evolution until his death. He firmly believed in the divine creation of life, although he admitted that species did become extinct from time to time. Towards the end of his life it was a disappointment to him that even his son, Alexander, was a proponent of evolution, but his own views remained unwavering. Given this, it is ironic that Agassiz's own work ended up supporting evolutionary theory. In fact, he is wellknown for his work showing that, to some extent, the development of an animal fetus within the womb shows some of the evolutionary steps that the animal's ancestors passed through during their evolution. For example, developing human fetuses have, at various times in their development, tails, gills, and webbed fingers. Agassiz himself felt that this observation was his single greatest contribution to science, and Charles Darwin (1809-1882) and others used this information to help buttress the (then) new theory of evolutionary change. Agassiz died in 1873 at the age of 66.
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