Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 137

perhaps the signature of a cooling earth. But Lyell argued, by his
entomological metaphor, that forces of uplift and consolidation might be
unvarying through time, as the uniformity of state required. The older the
rock, the longer it might be subject to constant forces of alteration, and the
more it might become baked and contorted. Only old rocks are so altered, just
as all insects reaching England are adult—but as beetle life cycles flow from
larva to adult in their native land, so too are rocks continually made in the
bowels of the earth, but only receive the imprint of contortion and
metamorphosis as they move toward the surface through time: "If the
disturbing power of the subterranean causes be exerted with uniform
intensity in each succeeding period, the quantity of convulsion undergone by
different groups of strata will generally be great in proportion to their
antiquity" (III, 335). Direction, in other words, is an illusion, as older rocks
receive more "attention" from the constant forces of time's cycle.
The Worst Case as Crucial Test: Lyell Probes Behind
Appearance to Deny Progression in Life's History
Most grand visions have crucial tests or tragic flaws. The paleontological
record played this dual role as goad and bugbear through- out Lyell's career
as he attempted to validate his vision of time's stately cycle. The problem is
simply stated: no other aspect of geology seems so clearly progressive in our
usual, vernacular sense— especially given our inordinate interest in
ourselves, our smug convictions about human superiority, and the restriction
of human fossils to the last microsecond of geological time.
The invertebrate record might easily be read in the light of time's cycle—
since most anatomical designs first appear at roughly the same time in the
oldest fossiliferous strata (as known in Lyell's time). But how could
appearances of progress—at least in the parochial sense of increasing
taxonomic proximity to Homo sapiens — be denied as reality in the record of
vertebrates? Fish came first, then reptiles, then mammals, and finally human
artifacts at the very