Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Henry Huxley.
In an 1860 debate over Darwin's theory, so legend has it, Huxley had defeated
a famous public speaker, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, known as “Soapy Sam” for
his unctuous delivery. Now evolution was under attack not from a cleric armed
with the Bible but from Kelvin, the leading British scientist, armed with impec-
cable and, to Huxley, impenetrable mathematics. Kelvin's 1868 assault had been
directed at geology, and Huxley happened to be president of the Geological Soci-
ety of London at the time. In his 1869 presidential address, he used the bully pulpit
to rebut Kelvin.
Huxley found himself in the same seemingly inferior position in which many
geologists over the next hundred years were to find themselves: unable to counter
an apparently superior quantitative argument from a physicist. Huxley well knew
that he was unable to use mathematics to refute Kelvin. But, he said, this left him
no worse off than “attorney[s] general,” who must “nevertheless contrive to gain
their causes, mainly by force of mother-wit and common-sense, aided by some
the long-dead Hutton and Playfair as his targets, pointing out that geologists had
long since modified the overly rigid uniformitarianism of the founding fathers. “To
my mind there appears to be no sort of necessary theoretical antagonism between
Catastrophism and Uniformitarianism. On the contrary, it is very conceivable that
catastrophes may be part and parcel of uniformity,” Huxley argued.
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In Huxley's most telling point, he elegantly summed up what today we often put
more crudely. “Mathematics may be compared to a mill of exquisite workmanship,
which grinds you stuff of any degree of fineness,” he said. “Nevertheless, what
you get out depends upon what you put in” (50).
Winding up, Huxley pointed out that Kelvin's results also depended on assump-
tions and suppositions. Asked Huxley, “Is the earth nothing but a cooling mass and
has its cooling been uniform? An affirmative answer to both these questions seems
to be necessary to the validity of the calculations on which Sir W. Thomson lays
so much stress” (52-53).
But Kelvin would not let Huxley off so lightly. In a response only two weeks
later, he began: “The very root of the evil to which I object is that so many geolo-
gists are contented to regard the general principles of natural philosophy, and their
application to terrestrial physics, as matters quite foreign to their ordinary pur-
suits.” Kelvin added, “A clever counsel may, by force of mother-wit and common
sense, readily carry a jury with him to either side, [but] I do not think that the high
