Did this 18th-century polymath accidentally invent the theory of natural selection?

Ideas & Philosophy · Published 29 September 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Pierre Louis Maupertuis was a French mathematician who led a daring expedition to Lapland to prove the Earth is oblate. Yet his most enduring legacy may be his radical, often overlooked biological speculations, which foreshadowed modern genetics and evolutionary theory long before Darwin ever put pen to paper.

Born in 1698 to a wealthy merchant family in Saint-Malo, Maupertuis rose to become a central figure in European science, eventually serving as the first president of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences under Frederick the Great. His early career was defined by the 'vis viva' controversy, where he championed Newtonian mechanics against Cartesian rivals. His 1736 mission to Lapland to measure the meridian arc settled a major debate, confirming that the Earth is flattened at the poles rather than elongated.

Beyond physics, Maupertuis ventured into biology with a provocative, pseudonymous approach. In his 1745 work, he proposed a theory of generation that rejected the need for a divine Creator, suggesting instead that life arose through the fortuitous combination of particles. He argued that nature produced a vast multitude of individuals, but only those with 'fitness'—such as functional mouths or reproductive organs—survived the struggle for existence. This mechanism, while not identical to modern evolution, anticipated the core logic of natural selection.

Maupertuis also pioneered early studies in heredity, treating phenotypic traits as statistical phenomena and suggesting that both parents contribute particles to their offspring. Though he was a brilliant polymath, his work was often marred by a lack of mathematical rigour and a difficult temperament that led to public feuds with figures like Voltaire. Despite this, his influence was profound; he was arguably a precursor to genetics and even anticipated Kant’s doctrine on the ideality of space, cementing his status as one of the Enlightenment's most enigmatic thinkers.

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