Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
equilibrium) to the overturn of entire faunas (catastrophic hypotheses of mass
extinction).
Lyell, by the power of his intellect and the strength of his vision, deserves his
status as the greatest of all geologists. But our modern understanding is not
his, either unvarnished or even predominantly, but rather an inextricable and
even mixture of uniformitarianism and catastrophism. Lyell won a rhetorical
war, and cast his opponents into a limbo of antiscience, but we have been
compelled to balance his dichotomy—because time's arrow and time's cycle
both capture important aspects of reality.
Epilogue
Most working scientists are notorious for their lack of interest in history. In
many fields, journals more than a decade old are removed from library
shelves and relegated to microfiche, to unheated attics, or even to the
junkpile.
During the summer of 1972, I met in Woods Hole with three of the best
young-Turk paleontologists and ecologists of our day— Dave Raup, Tom
Schopf, and Dan Simberloff. We were trying, immodestly to be sure and with
limited success as it happened, to find a new approach to the study of life's
history. We wanted to break away from a paleontological tradition that we
found stultifying—a training that made professionals into experts about
particular groups at particular times in particular places, and seemed to
discourage any development of general theories that might be expressed in
testable and quantitative terms. We decided to work with random models of
origin and extinction, treating species as particles with no special properties
linked to their taxonomic status or time of flourishing. As we proceeded, we
realized that our models bore remarkable similarity in concept to Lyell's
method for dating the Tertiary. Indeed, we recognized that his vision of
time's stately cycle had become the ground of our proposal. And so, for
several hours, four young scientists out to change the world sat around a table
and talked about Charles Lyell.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search