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Hutton and the methods of history
One cannot criticize a person for ignoring what he had no reason to consider.
If Hutton had been a physicist who never worked with the data of history, my
comments would be out of place. But Hutton not only used such data; he also
showed deep understanding of methods for historical inference.
In studying Darwin, I have tried to show (Gould, 1982, 1986a) that the
development of a general methodology for historical inference forms the
coordinating theme for all his books. I have arranged his methods as a
sequence of different strategies in the face of decreasing information. As I
read Hutton, and became more impressed by his subtle understanding of
historical inquiry, I found that he used all Darwin's methods. The finest
illustration of Hutton's actively ahistorical focus lies in his masterful
understanding of how history may be inferred, followed by explicit rejection
of the subject for itself, and the marshaling of its data to establish a general
theory that makes history uninteresting.
Consider two examples. In best cases, we know the process that produced
past events and can observe its operation today. We extrapolate current rates
through time to see if continued operation can yield die full extent of past
phenomena. This is uniformitarianism in its pure form. The major stumbling
block for this method lies in a popular perception that change so slow is no
change at all; but deep time provides a matrix that converts the imperceptible
to the mightily efficient. Hutton uses this argument to maintain that slow
erosion by streams and waves will destroy the continents (as Darwin argued
that natural selection of tiny changes extrapolates to major trends in
evolution, or that worms, working slowly and unnoticed beneath our feet,
will in time shape the topography of England):
The object which I have in view, is to show, first, that the natural operations
of the earth, continued in a sufficient space of time, would be adequate to the
effects which we observe; and secondly, that it is necessary, in the system of
the world, that these wasting operations of the land should be extremely
slow. In that case, those different opinions would be reconciled in one which
would
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