Boundaries - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 195

Boundaries 195
ure 5.7), might work in an ahistorical world where organisms, like chemical elements
on the periodic table, record timeless laws of nature, not complex contingencies of
genealogy. Darwin removed the rationale for such numerologies in a single blow.
The exterminating angel was history, not evolution itself. Some theories of evolution
might permit such an ordered simplicity, but not Darwin's truly historical system with
natural selection tracking a complex and unpredictable vector of climatic and
geographic change, and with substantial randomness in the sources of variation. We
tend to laugh at Swainson today, but his system was neither foolish nor irrational
(and it was popular in his day). Quinarianism is intelligible in an ahistorical world,
but we now know that taxonomic order is a product of "just history"— and the
jumble of life's genealogies cannot fall into rigid circles of five.
Likewise, the ordered and predictable geological histories of Steno and Burnet are
intelligible on a young earth imbued by a
Figure 5.7
Swainson's rigidly numerological system of taxonomy, inconceivable for
an arrangement of organisms in a world of contingent history.