Charles Lyell, Historian of Time's Cycle - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 177

earthly agents alone, as sources of geological change. Comets, I note, are
now a favored mechanism for mass extinction under the Alvarez hypothesis:
"He [Whiston] retarded the progress of truth, diverting men from the
investigation of the laws of sublunary nature, and inducing them to waste
time in speculations on die power of comets to drag the waters of die ocean
over the land—on the condensation of the vapors of their tails into water, and
other matters equally edifying" (I, 39).
Most geologists, especially if they believe the textbook cardboard they read
as students, think that Lyell was the founder of modern practice in our
profession. I do not deny that Principles of Geology was the most important,
the most influential, and surely the most beautifully crafted work of
nineteenth-century geology. Yet if we ask how LyelPs controlling vision has
influenced modern geology, we must admit that current views represent a
pretty evenly shuffled deck between attitudes held by Lyell and the
catastrophists. We do adhere to Lyell's two methodological uniformities as a
foundation of proper scientific practice, and we continue to praise Lyell for
his ingenious and forceful defense. But uniformities of law and process were
a common property of Lyell and his catastrophist opponents— and our
current allegiance does not mark Lyell's particular triumph.
As for substantive uniformities of rate and state, our complex and
multifarious world says yes and no to bits of both. Lyell himself abandoned
uniformity of state for life's history, while a primary thrust of modern
research into Precambrian strata (the first five- sixths of our earth's history!)
tries to identify how die early earth differed—in sedimentary consequences
of an atmosphere devoid of oxygen, for example—from the current order of
nature. The great geologist Paul Krynine once called
"uniformitarianism" (but meaning only uniformity of state) "a dangerous
doctrine" because it led us to deny or underplay these early differences
(Krynine, 1956). Even uniformity of rate, Lyell's stronger and more
persistent argument, has suffered increasing attack as a generality. In the
history of life, for example, alternative punctuational styles of change have
been advocated at all levels—from the origin of species (punctuated