LAS VEGAS - August 12, 2009 -God and politics have long been considered among the most volatile and taboo conversation starters, and a new study by UNLV geoscientist Steve Rowland shows that the depths of their influence even extended to the most revered figures in U.S. history.
In a study published this month by the Geological Society of America, Rowland argues that Thomas Jefferson's stubborn commitment to his personal religious beliefs and public political agenda - as well as his role as eldest son - kept him from ever fully embracing the concept of biological extinction, despite the overwhelming evidence that supported it. This study is the first to examine in depth why Jefferson seemed unable to abandon what his fellow naturalists considered an obsolete worldview.
"Even after significant scientific evidence seemed to prove otherwise, Jefferson held fast to his belief that God would not allow the integrity of his creation to be defiled," says Rowland. "He believed so strongly that nature reflected the perfection and goodness of God, that the very idea of biological extinction was simply unimaginable."
According to Rowland, Jefferson viewed species extinction with a "completeness of nature" worldview, in which people believed all living things were divinely planned as part of a hierarchical order overseen by God and therefore never became extinct. At the same time, however, new evidence in the fossil record challenged Jefferson's views on extinction.
Rowland also argues that Jefferson's evolving philosophy as a naturalist was shaped as much by his strident patriotism as it was by his adherence to personal religious views. He was emotionally invested in the idea that America was young, energetic, and strong--traits that he attributed not only to the country's economic and political systems, but to its ecological and biological resources as well. Jefferson took great offense to claims made in the popular writings of French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon that New World species were generally smaller, weaker, and inferior to their counterparts in the Old World.
According to Rowland, Jefferson devoted considerable time during the last two decades of the 18th century to discrediting Buffon's theory of American degeneracy, noting that Buffon's writings cast America as a weak and inferior land, potentially compromising the support that Jefferson - then U.S. minister to France - was seeking.
Jefferson's reluctance to embrace a new ideology regarding the concept of extinction was also influenced, Rowland suggests, by a third, relatively understudied factor in Jefferson's life: his birth order.
Rowland cites data from research by psychologist and science historian Frank Sulloway, who has examined how family dynamics effect personality development and says that firstborns tend to identify closely with parents and authority, resulting in distinctive personality traits, including a resistance to radical ideas. According to Rowland, Jefferson was the eldest son and the evidence suggests that he was averse to new scientific ideas, particularly those that clashed with his religious beliefs and general worldview.
Rowland's study appears as a chapter in the Geological Society of America Memoir 203, The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
