The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 6

the earth, and it shall teach thee. Two key Huttonian observations fueled the
discovery of deep time—first, the recognition that granite is an igneous rock,
representing a restorative force of uplift (so that the earth may cycle
endlessly, rather than eroding once into ruin); and, second, the proper
interpretation of unconformities as boundaries between cycles of uplift and
erosion (providing direct evidence for episodic renewal rather than short and
unilinear decrepitude).
But the world was not ready for Hutton (and he was too lousy a writer to
persuade anyone anyway). Thus, the codification of deep time awaited the
great textbook of Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology (1830-1833). Lyell
triumphed by his magisterial compendium of factual information about rates
and modes of current geological processes—proving that the slow and steady
operation of ordinary causes could, when extended through deep time,
produce all geological events (from the Grand Canyon to mass extinctions).
Students of the earth could now reject the miraculous agents that
compression into biblical chronology had required. The discovery of deep
time, in this version, becomes one of history's greatest triumphs of
observation and objectivity over preconception and irrationalism.
Like so many tales in the heroic mode, this account of deep time is about
equally long on inspiration and short on accuracy. Twenty- five years after N.
R. Hanson, T. S. Kuhn, and so many other historians and philosophers began
to map out the intricate interpenetrations of fact and theory, and of science
and society, the rationale for such a simplistic one-way flow from
observation to theory has become entirely bankrupt. Science may differ from
other intellectual activity in its focus upon the construction and operation of
natural objects. But scientists are not robotic inducing machines that infer
structures of explanation only from regularities observed in natural
phenomena (assuming, as I doubt, that such a style of reasoning could ever
achieve success in principle). Scientists are human beings, immersed in
culture, and struggling with all the curious tools of inference that mind
permits—from metaphor and analogy to all the flights of fruitful imagination
that C. S. Peirce