Before broad awareness of the current trend toward global warming, some scientists anticipated a future continental glaciation episode would affect North America, Europe and Asia. Is fossil fuel combustion overriding a natural trend toward global cooling?
Analysis of environmental data with a global scale is underway in elaborate and diverse efforts, and scientists have tried hard to engage governments and the public, with only moderate success.
Understanding Global Warming is a crucial scientific goal. It seems that understanding the things that caused Pleistocene glaciation is a key.
For the rest of his life, Agassiz promoted and defended Cuvier's geological views and his classification of the animals. With the publication of his vast work on the fossil record of fishes, Poissons fossiles, Agassiz's reputation began to grow in the scientific community. After Cuvier's death, Agassiz took up a professorship at the Lyceum of Neuchatel in Switzerland, where for thirteen years he worked on many projects in paleontology, systematics, and glaciology.
Agassiz took up the study of glaciers in and was guided by colleagues Ignatz Venetz and Jean de Charpentier to examine the geological features of his native Switzerland.
Agassiz noticed the marks that glaciers left on the Earth: great valleys; large glacial erratic boulders carried long distances; scratches and smoothing of rocks; mounds of debris called moraines pushed up by glacial advances. He realized that in many places these signs of glaciation could be seen where no glaciers existed.
Agassiz later found even more evidence of glaciation in North America. In , Agassiz came to the United States on a lecture tour; he was a huge popular success and his expertise was widely recognized and celebrated. In he accepted a professorship at Harvard. He immediately set about organizing and acquiring funding for a great museum of natural history. In his dream came true with the founding of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, which opened its doors in This was the first publicly funded science building in North America.
Agassiz labored for support of science in his adopted homeland; he and his colleagues urged the creation of a National Academy of Sciences , and Agassiz became a founding member in Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science. Toggle navigation. Louis Agassiz recognized that global climatic conditions in the past had led to ice ages in which glaciers covered a much larger part of the Earth than they do today.
Bibliography Gordon, John E. User Contributions:. Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: Name:. Agassiz used polygenism to argue that Black people were part of an inferior race Gould, , p.
Agassiz also attempted to classify human races like the biological specimens in his museum. He commissioned photographs of enslaved peoples in the American South and Brazil and people of African, indigenious South American, and mixed racial descent in Brazil as evidence—in his eyes—of the inferiority of non-white peoples and the dangers of interracial children Machado, ; L.
Agassiz, , Appendix V. While Agassiz thought of himself as a supporter of abolition Wallis, , he strongly and unabashedly advocated for segregation and advocated against mixed-race children and social equality between whites and Blacks; Agassiz justified his position via pseudoscientific studies Gould, , p.
As an educator at a prominent university and as the most high-profile popularizer of science of his day, Agassiz had a significant platform from which to advocate his racist ideologies, both among his students and in the broader academic and political community. His public writings and lectures touched both on the scientific question of human origins and on socio-political questions of racial equality e.
Notably, he was a close mentor of Nathaniel S. MCZ also plans to collaborate with the campus initiative on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery to highlight the views and impact of Louis Agassiz. In addition, there is a sign marking the location of the home of the first President of Radcliffe College, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz who was married to Louis Agassiz, that makes reference to both of their achievements without noting his contributions to scientific racism.
The Cambridge Maria L. Baldwin School, originally named after Agassiz, was renamed in Dorgan, Numerous landmarks remain named after Agassiz. Improperly crediting associates for ideas i. Agassiz, Louis Agassiz, L Sketch on the natural provinces of the animal world, and their relations to the different types of man.
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