Stephen Jay Gould
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In Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle, Stephen Jay Gould discusses the evolution of geologists' understanding of the concept of deep time. Gould studied texts by Thomas Burnet, James Hutton, and Charles Lyell--three scientific writers who approached this question in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Traditionally, readings of these three writers tended to focus on the degree to which each man employed the scientific method in investigating the question of the Earth's age. The greater the scientist's dependence on scientific method, the historians reasoned, the closer he came to the truth. Thus, these scientists have often been ranked, and understood, on the basis of their adherence to standards that are familiar to the twentieth century, but were still evolving when they wrote. In the course of his repeated close readings of the texts, in which he often returned to the original editions, Gould discovered that the traditional readings did not correspond with what these men had actually written or, more importantly, with how they had thought about the problems before them. Gould's book is a demonstration of the vital importance of understanding the assumptions that scientists make before judging either their results, or the quality of their thought. In the case of writers who did not possess the "essentially modern cast of mind" through which the twentieth century attempts to understand them, it is necessary to ask what paradigms guided their thought, and
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hus, Burnet interpreted the present state of the earth, its 'ruined' state, as reflecting the processes of history. Though the type of inference that Burnet made is correct for biological entities, it does not work with geology, unless one is attempting to use the fossil record to mark the events that punctuate historical time. Burnet, however, had no conception of using the fossil record in this manner. He was left with the time's arrow version of time, which did not provide an adequate explanation of the basically cyclical form of the earth's history (and future) that was present in the Bible and must, therefore, be explained in rational terms. He was unwilling to accept the Greek notion of "exact cyclical repetition," which destroyed even the possibility of history (48). Therefore, he had to find an answer that allowed for the historical and the cyclical versions of time. His solution was that cycles turn, but, each time, they "repeat with crucial differences" (49). The material substrate stays the same, as the same materials are being recycled endlessly, "but resulting forms alter, often in a definite direction so that each repetition passes with distinctive and identifiable distinctions" (49). This tension between the
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Approximate Word count = 2783
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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