Charles Bonnet

Charles Bonnet (born March 13, 1720, Geneva, Switzerland—died May 20, 1793, near Geneva) was a Swiss naturalist and philosophical writer who discovered parthenogenesis (reproduction without fertilization) and developed the catastrophe theory of evolution.

Though Bonnet was a lawyer by profession, his favourite pursuit was natural science. Concentrating first on entomology, he studied the habits of the aphid and found that the female insect was able to reproduce without fertilization by the male. In 1742 he discovered that caterpillars and butterflies breathe through pores, which he named stigmata. Bonnet next turned to botany, studying the structures and functions of leaves.

In 1760, after documenting the symptoms experienced by his grandfather, Bonnet was the first to describe a condition in which the brain adjusted to vision loss by creating hallucinations. Bonnet’s own eyesight declined throughout his life, and he also experienced this condition, which would become known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) in 1937.

Approaching blindness forced him to change his emphasis once more, this time to philosophy. Affected by his observation of the aphid, Bonnet argued in Considérations sur les corps organisés (1762; “Considerations on Organized Bodies”) that each female organism contains within its germ cells (i.e., eggs) an infinite series of preformed individuals, leading to an immortality and immutability of species. He responded to fossil evidence of extinct species with La Palingénésie philosophique (1769; “The Philosophical Revival”), in which he theorized that Earth periodically suffers universal catastrophes, destroying most life, and that the survivors move up a notch on the evolutionary scale. Bonnet was the first to use the term evolution in a biological context. His Essai de psychologie (1754) and Essai analytique sur les facultés de l’âme (1760; “Analytical Essay on the Powers of the Soul”) anticipated physiological psychology.