Question

How might the following naturalists have explained the physical and/or behavioural characteristics of the bat (in general, disregarding particular species)?

1. John Ray and/or William Paley (natural theology)

2. Georges Cuvier

3. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

4. Charles Darwin

Where would they disagree with each other?

Answer 1

1. John Ray and William Paley

John Ray wrote The Wisdom of God, Manifest in the Works of the Creation in 1691. His first book was about the local plants of Cambridge; he distinguished monocots and dicots. He was first to group bats and whales with mammals. He pointed out that mammal hearts have four chambers while fish hearts have only two. Adaptation was usually attributed to divine benevolence. William Paley's "Natural Theology" came from this idea and from John Ray's idea. Around the time of the French Revolution social hierarchies and monarchies came into question. New ideas of the Enlightenment included "progress" and environmental determinism.

2. Georges Cuvier

He was a French naturalist and zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuvier was a major figure in natural science research in the early 19th century and was instrumental in comparing living animals with fossils.

Georges Curvier, the highly respected anatomist, caustically dismissed the notion that hearing could permot bats to aviod obstacles. He found that covering bats mouths reduced the intensity of these sounds so much that bats collided with small obstacles.

Curvier is also remembered for strongly opposing theories of evolution, which at the time (before Darwin's theory) were mainly proposed by Jean-Baptiste de Lanmarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Cuvier belived there was no evidence for evolution, but rather evidence for cyclical creations and destructions of life forms by global extinction events such as deluges. In 1830, Curvier and Geoffroy engaged in a famous debate, which is said to exemplify the two major deviations in biological thinking at the time- whether animal structure was due to function or (evolutionary) morphology. Curvier supported function and rejected Lamarck's thinking.

3. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

Fifty years before Darwin came up with his theory of evolution, French naturalist Jean-Beptiste Lamarck came up with the idea of the "inheritance of acquired traits", which said exactly that: what parents did to their own bodies would affect their childern's bodies. Lamarck proposed that giraffes stretch their necks by reaching higher in trees for leaves and then pass on those stretched necks to their young, of course, this doesn't happen.

But now it seems that Lamarck might be partly right. The science magazine Discover reports that scientist took fat, yellow, sickly mice and fed the mother mice a special diet. Those mothers babies turned out to be thin, brown and healthy. This outcome gave scientists a jolt. According to Darwin's theory of evolution, the mice should have looked like their parents.

Analogous structures are physicaly (but not geneticaly) similar structures that were not present the last common ancestor. Bat wings and bird wings evolved independently and are considered analogous structures. Generally, a bat wing and a birds wing have little in common; the last common ancestor of bats and birds did not have wings like either bats or birds.

4. Charles Darwin

Darwin's theory: This theory was given by the Charles Robert Darwin. He gave the theory of natural selection. Acccording to this theory, in the struggle for survival only those animal live who adapt them according to nature.

His foresaw an issue with his theory of evolution by natural selection in the evolution of complex traits such as eyes or structure and hadits of a bat. Indeed, the oldest bat fossils are very similar in wing morphology to the bats of today, despite living and dying 52.5 million years ago.