> I had no idea he was interested in evolution and ecology. That’s what he’s most famous for. As the article alludes to, he more or less created ecology as a s

> I had no idea he was interested in evolution and ecology. That’s what he’s most famous for. As the article alludes to, he more or less created ecology as a science. His Natural history is huge as well, this was a milestone in the establishment of zoology as a discipline. It is difficult to overstate how important he was for biology as a whole. The evolution stuff is more or less a consequence of this: he noticed similarities and differences between species living in different places and in what we would now call ecological niches. That said, even though he got some intuition for the concept of evolution, he did not really find a good driving force to explain it (he explained the changes by changes in environment), which is an essential contribution of Darwin. [edit] also, nobody calls him Georges-Louis Leclerc, he is usually referred to as “Buffon”.