Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science, General, Life Sciences, Evolution, Earth Sciences, Geology, History
ISBN: 9780674891982
Google: tmMSAQAAIAAJ
Publisher: HarvardUP
Published: 1987-09-15T20:38:39+00:00

Charles Lyell, Self-Made in Cardboard

Lyell’s Rhetoric

As De la Beche had noted in caricature, Charles Lyell was a lawyer by profession—a barrister no less, skilled in the finest points of verbal persuasion. Thus, although early sections in previous chapters on Burnet and Hutton treat cardboard histories as preached by textbooks, the Lyellian myth is a double whammy. The legends of Burnet and Hutton are later constructions, but Lyell built his own edifice with the most brilliant brief ever written by a scientist. This brief, moreover, established forever the cardboard history that fueled the emerging legends of Burnet and Hutton as well. Lyell constructed the self-serving history that has encumbered the study of earthly time ever since.

The first volume of Lyell’s Principles of Geology (published in three volumes between 1830 and 1833) begins with five chapters on the history of geology and its lessons for establishing a proper approach to a modern study of the earth. Lyell’s great treatise is not, as so often stated, a textbook summarizing all prevailing knowledge in a systematic way, but a passionate brief for a single, well-formed argument, hammered home relentlessly. All sections of the text, including the introductory history, push the same theme, while the order of sections also records the smoothly unfolding brief. The famous sentence penned by Darwin to introduce the last chapter of the Origin of Species would serve as well for Lyell’s three installments: “this whole volume is one long argument.”

Roughly characterized, Lyell holds that geological truth must be unraveled by strict adherence to a methodology that he did not name, but that soon received the cumbersome designation of “uniformitarianism” (in a review by William Whewell, written in 1832). Lyell captured the essence of uniformity in the subtitle to his treatise: “an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth’s surface by reference to causes now in operation.” The proposition seems simple enough. Science is the study of processes. Past processes are, in principle, unobservable; only their frozen results remain as evidence for ancient history—fossils, mountains, lavas, ripple marks. To learn about past processes, we must compare these past results with modern phenomena formed by processes that we can observe directly. In this sense, the present must be our key to the past (Figure 4.2).

If Lyellian uniformity only advocated this evident statement of method, it would be uncontroversial and not particularly enlightening. But Lyell held a complex view of uniformity that mixed this consensus about method with a radical claim about substance—the actual workings of the empirical world. Lyell argued that all past events—yes, every single one—could be explained by the action of causes now in operation. No old causes are extinct; no new ones have been introduced. Moreover, past causes have always operated—yes, always—at about the same rate and intensity as they do today. No secular increases or decreases through time. No ancient periods of pristine vigor or slow cranking up. The earth, in short, has always worked (and looked) just about as it does now. (I shall present a taxonomy of the various, and partly contradictory, meanings of uniformity, in the next section.

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