The Discovery of Deep Time - Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time - page 9

of his achievement—evolution versus creation—backward into time, forcing
it upon different debates about other vital subjects. Examples are legion, and
I have treated several in my essays—from a rampant precursoritis that tries to
find Darwinian seeds in Greek thought; to the search for evolutionary tidbits
in pre-Darwinian works, leading us to ignore, for example, an extensive and
subtle treatise about embryology for a fleeting passage about change (see
Gould, 1985, on Maupertuis); to the miscasting as creationist of a great
tradition in structural biology (from Geoffrey Saint-Hilaire to Richard Owen)
because its theory of change denied an environmental underpinning and
therefore seemed antievolutionary to some who equated transmutation itself
with later views about its mechanisms (Gould, 1986b, on Richard Owen).
Other misleading dichotomies are mired in the tradition of whiggish history
in science, including the divisions that have so badly miscast the history of
geology and its discovery of deep time: uniformitarianism/catastrophism,
empiricist/speculator, reason/rev- elation, true/false. Lyell, as we shall see,
established much of the rhetoric for these divisions, but we have been led
astray by following him uncritically.
I do not wish to argue that other dichotomies are "truer." Dichotomies are
useful or misleading, not true or false. They are simplifying models for
organizing thought, not ways of the world. Yet I believe, for reasons I shall
outline in the next section, that one neglected dichotomy about the nature of
time has particular value in unlocking the visions of my three key actors in
the drama of deep time.
All great theories are expansive, and all notions so rich in scope and
implication are underpinned by visions about the nature of things. You may
call these visions "philosophy," or "metaphor," or "organizing principle," but
one thing they are surely not—they are not simple inductions from observed
facts of the natural world. I shall try to show that Button and Lyell,
traditional discoverers of deep time in the British tradition, were motivated as
much (or more) by such a vision about time, as by superior knowledge of