Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
ton's cycles required vastly longer periods. As his devoted biographer and inter-
preter, John Playfair, wrote, they required an “abyss of time.”
9
Huttonearnedhispositionasthe“Father ofGeology”forastatement thatwould
become the guiding principle of geologic thought and practice:
Not only are no powers to be employed that are not natural to the globe, no action to be admit-
ted of except those of which we know the principle, and no extraordinary events to be alledged
in order to explain a common appearance . . . we are not to make nature act in violation to that
order which we actually observe . . . chaos and confusion are not to be introduced into the or-
der of nature, because certain things appear to our partial views as being in some disorder. Nor
are we to proceed in feigning causes, when those seem insufficient which occur in our experi-
ence.
10
Charles Lyell (1797-1875) extended Hutton's theory in a topic titled
Principles
of Geology
. The first edition appeared in 1830 and the last, published posthum-
ously, in 1875. The topic made Lyell the most influential geological writer in his-
tory. Trained first as a lawyer, Lyell's
Principles
was a “passionate brief for a
single, well-formed argument, hammered home relentlessly.”
11
Like Hutton, Lyell believed that God created the Earth for humans. But once
he set the Earth going, never again did he intervene in its workings. Natural laws
are invariant. Moreover, not only are the processes that we observe today the only
ones that have ever operated, but they also have always operated at the same rate.
According to Lyell, “If in any part of the globe the energy of a cause appears to
have decreased, it is always probable that the diminution of intensity in its action
is merely local, and that its force is unimpaired, when the whole globe is con-
from a comet.”
13
According to Lyell, while change is constant on Earth, it does not lead any-
where. Our planet has always looked about as it does now, its history revealing no
evidence of progress. Even extinction does not represent permanent change: “The
huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while
the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.”
14
Had the Earth been on trial with Lyell as prosecuting attorney, the defense might
earthly processes do not vary. This we may call the constancy of law and process.
Second, neither the rate at which those processes operate nor the overall condition
of the Earth vary. This we may call the constancy of rate and state. One could ac-
cept the first constancy without having to accept the second. In what Stephen Jay
Gould has called “the greatest trick of rhetoric . . . in the entire history of science,”
