Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 169

formities that had fueled his rhetoric for forty years—and admits that a
scientist can accept progression in life's history while holding firm to the
uniformities of law and process:
But his reliance need not be shaken in the unvarying constancy of the laws of
nature [uniformity of law], or in his power of reasoning from the present to
the past in regard to the changes of the terrestrial system [uniformity of
process], whether in the organic or inorganic world, provided that he does not
deny, in the organic world at least, the possibility of a law of evolution and
progress. (1872, I, 171)
Lyell tries to mitigate the meaning of his conversion, depicting it as a minor
shift imposed by evidence, and characterizing his former denial of progress
as simple skepticism based on insufficient data, but we can scarcely credit
this minimization of change. For, by admitting progress in life's history, Lyell
surrendered both his vision and all its sequelae, including his dream of a
statistical paleontology.
The dates of the successive appearance of certain classes, orders, and genera,
those of higher organization always characterizing rocks newer in the series,
have often been mis-stated, and the detection of chronological errors has
engendered doubts as to the soundness of the theory of progression. In these
doubts I myself indulged freely in former editions of this work. But after
numerous corrections have been made as to the date of the earliest signs of
life on the globe, and the periods when more highly organized beings,
whether animal or vegetable, first entered on the stage, the original theory
[progressionism, not uniformity of state] may be defended in a form but
slightly modified. (1872, I, 145)
I believe that Lyell's retreat and surrender usually receive a backward
interpretation—another unfortunate result of our anachronistic tendency to
impose Darwin's theory of natural selection upon older debates and then to
interpret them as part of a great dichotomy between evolution and creation.
This reading holds that evo-