At a time in the recent past, humanity did not know about extinction - everything seemed to exist in perpetuity. Then came Cuvier, a French naturalist who looked at fossils (which were assumed to belong to humans in some cases, and elephants in other) and said, they were in fact extinct.

Our knowledge of the world seems to have grown in almost all the aspects in this similar fashion - the solar system, Newton’s law.

While listening to his story in The Sixth Extinction, I came to know about his colleague - Lamarck who was a proponent of evolution. Cuvier did not believe in evolution.

While reading about this I thought about the concept of mental models which I am reading about in The Great Mental Models and I thought this is the same thing. Based on their models of the world, they came to different conclusions.