Geography Reference
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168,000 years old; Montesquieu, Diderot, and Kant suggested that it may be
hundreds of millions of years old. In 1788, James Hutton rejected biblical
notions of catastrophism, concluding that even more enormous stretches of
time were necessary for erosional and depositional processes to sculpt the
planet. Darwin himself guessed the age at 300 million years. Eventually, geol-
ogy and evolutionary theory stretched the concept of terrestrial time from a
biblical few thousands of years to a stratigraphic measure of millions, and
ultimately to a cosmological frame of billions. The rise of stratigraphical
paleontology con
rmed this view and extended it into the domain of biology.
Not surprisingly, Darwin began as a geologist. In publishing
The Origin of
Species
in 1869, Darwin set of
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a
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firestorm of opposition from religious
conservatives. The
first empirical evidence for Darwinism's application of
evolutionary theory to human beings came a generation later: the
fi
fi
rst
Homo
erectus
fossil was unearthed in 1895, and the
rst
Australopithecus
surfaced in
South Africa in 1925. The theory of natural selection not only brought into
question the ostensible di
fi
erences between humans and animals, but eroded
the foundations of Christian time as endless and god-given.
Many debates about age of the earth centered on Lord Kelvin's calcula-
tions of the planet's thermal conductivity: in 1862, Kelvin calculated the rate
at which the earth cooled and argued for an age between 20 million and
100 million years, although he was later forced to revise this
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gure upon the
discovery of radioactivity in the 1890s. Subsequent geological and biological
interpretations were complemented by the nascent
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field of thermodynamics,
which wove together electricity and magnetism. In the 1850s, German physi-
cist Rudolf Clausius formulated the second law of thermodynamics, theor-
izing a natural tendency toward entropy maximization that powerfully
informed other sciences. Entropy was cast into probabilistic terms by Ludwig
Boltzmann, who argued that since the initial amount of disorder in the uni-
verse was relatively small, it was statistically bound to grow over time. Besides
being instrumental in the discovery of radioactivity, thermodynamics had
important implications for the scienti
fi
c understanding of time; in intro-
ducing the “arrow of time,” it annihilated classical notions of temporal
reversibility. “Western science in the nineteenth century proposed interpret-
ations of the past of the planet in terms of development in a single direction
from a
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final end . . . [and] suggested that
the universe was heading for entropic immolation and that its entire history
could be described as a single process of energy loss” (Fernandez-Arnesto
1999:248). There was, therefore, no intrinsic direction of time, except in
the direction of mounting entropy. As Petersson (2005:215) observes, “The
thermodynamic revolution proves that the universe is historical, with a tem-
poral beginning and a future end towards which we are inevitably heading.
This is quite the opposite of the
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finite starting-point or towards a
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fixed, static universe described by Newton's
reversible equations.” In the same vein, the discovery of X rays in 1895 had
important cultural as well as medical e
fi
ects. X rays “seemed to render inside
and outside ambiguous, the opaque became transparent” (Miller 2002:3).
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