Who Was George-Louis Buffon?

Who Was George-Louis Buffon?

            We, Team Buffon, decided that we were going to grow and use French Vanilla Marigolds for our Biology 11 plant lab project. Although French Vanilla Marigolds and Georges-Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon have no real connection to each other, Buffon is a major reason why we now understand where these plants came from, and also a big reason why we are able to taxonomically rank them. Buffon was born on September 7, 1707 and he was a French born genius who grew up in a wealthy and prestigious family made up of aristocrats in Montbard, France. He was very well educated in the fields of medicine, mathematics and law but he never really truly had any interest in them. He lived in a time where the world around him and why everything was the way it was was all based on ideas made by the church and people who really could not truly explain and find proper evidence for what they stated. Information was so bleak, and peoples knowledge was very small and nobody ever tried to test the "established" ideas floating around. Buffon was different, and he was continually wanting to know more. He loved and was interested in nature and so he left the fields he studied for and went on to try to answer the questions he had about why life was what it was. He loved natures diversity, and he believed that life was not created the way it was as people saw it at the time. He believed everything they saw now was all a buildup of change that came from years and years of modification, adaptation and migration. He stated many things that people at the time would have perceived as crazy, including the idea that most life forms could be traced back to a few or even a single ancestor. He never gave up though, and he created a pathway for all other naturalists in the future to follow. He was a driving force behind one of the largest quests for knowledge in the natural world, and he was able to shed light on a lot of things that have helped us in the future too.